Into that glorious world
by aurochsandangels
Summary: What if Heathcliff came back in April instead of September?This was originally supposed to be a what if fluff piece,but I had so much fun with the notes I made a whole story out of it.WH is unequaled,& I don't presume to match one word to Emily,s.Have fun
1. Chapter 1

Heathcliff. The one named had served him since he was six. At eighteen, he now had entire history with which he could eliminate it, but he would not for his soul lay in the etymology of it. It was not his to give away.

Stepping from the ship, ironically, the '_Constance' _Which had brought him back at last, from the Heathen wilderness of America_, _he studied his own shadow, appearing for a moment on the ground beneath a swath of moonlight, escaping from a rift in the dull sky. Though an admirable form, he was indifferent to it except for a passing amusement on how it was finally twisted and distorted into oblivion by the shifting light; tall, broad at the shoulder, staunch yet somehow pleasantly flexible and graceful. He'd gained no more than an inch or two in the two years since his escape, but the loss of an ignoble posture made all the difference.

He paused at the foot of the gangplank, letting the crowd surge by him like a legion of ghosts, exiting into the dark and out of memory forever, the night air was balmy and slightly fetid with commingled vapors of the quay and the distant city. The smell of despair and evil he thought, and of death as well, the death of warmth of hope and sweetness.

Contrived and vain as it proved itself to be, he had created for himself a kingdom out of summer. It was a sovereignty built from toil and bitter grief, but beautiful nonetheless in its sanguine construction. The Americas, Spain, and Greece; He had moved through these golden lands as the living dead, with one animating thought, one certainty that he would one day retrace those paths by her side, as he had every path since childhood. She was with him always like a star, his darling pain, Distant and bright. Now as the mouldering horizons of Liverpool affronted him, he saw, not a dream before him, but the extermination of all desire.

Was love, his very existence, existing in her an invention? In time, all invention would belong to her but before her, from the time he could remember at all he often fabricated things; other worlds, affixing destinies and lineages to faces in the passing throngs, connections with himself. A lifetime ago, not far from where he stood now gazing up at the leaden sky, he glimpsed for the last time, his own mother.

That face; long after all its associations had vanished, it remained. Time imbued the dark eyes with nobility, the expression with pride, so she continued to exist in ever evolving venues unchanged and ageless. Hadn't the nursemaid, Ellen dean affirmed in a strange coincidence "Your mother was an Indian queen, your father emperor of China."

Catherine, Cathy just the name was an enervation as if he has been shot through with lightening. He couldn't recall a time when they were separate. Even before awareness of self she was there, in strange thoughts fluttering through his like bright moths.

He knew her the first night he came to Wuthering Heights, as she hid in her fathers shadow looking out from the sheltering darkness at him like a ghost in a mirror. Her eyes were so dark in the candle light he thought them black as his own. They reminded him of the empty heavens, the night sky without stars.

He thought her the ugliest girl he had ever seen; her pale golden face sporting a swath of red across the nose and cheeks from the sun, taking on a greenish hue in the frail light. Her hair, almost as black as her eyes, hung far below her shoulders in undecided states of lank curl and unruly tangle. Her front teeth had not grown in completely yet and this made her look rather dumb as she gaped at him.

She stepped out only to spit on him, to stamp on his bare foot with her boot, to fling some expletives at him even he had never heard before; this following a shrill interrogation over some lost treasure. The man, Mr. Earnshaw, who had brought him, who had spoken so softly before, delivered her a resounding blow across the face. Heathcliff felt this; He had been all but insensitive to the insults she visited on him, but he felt the other run him through like a sword.

He knew nothing of her but her name, felt nothing for her, yet he felt the tears start in his eyes, where hers were dry, felt his frame tremble where hers grew defensive. He'd seen other children so treated,some far worse, and did not connect any emotion to it whatsoever. He was not cruel, but had only been from infancy, a cool observer of humanity. If he pondered these things unsympathetically, it was without prejudice as well.

There was not much else he cared to remember from that night, though he could in the most excruciating detail if he was wont to do so. Ellen Dean's vicious scrubbing always came back; a singular offense, because she was barely older than himself, another child sanctioning him with the authority of an elder. It was not to be borne. He fought her, and she fought him back, until the boiling water went into his mouth, and his nose and he couldn't breathe; Until he could only stand there shivering, waiting to be delivered from her hands. She did not seek out a bed for him but left on the stairs, and he thought he would run away.

He was attempting to gauge the distance, the hours between here and where he came from, but it was overwhelming. The span was incalculable as final as the distance from earth to the moon. Unbidden, an image came to him, usurping the desolate map he was studying. His mothers face, or so it seemed, a face like his own. He wanted her whoever she was, olive skinned and black eyed; long black eyes always veiled by their lashes so that they would seem scheming and cold when they were not. He could not even remember what she had called him, but she smelled like smoke and lilies. She held him once in her arms and he could feel the sharpness of her bones through the thin stuff of her gown. He had one relic from her, a gold locket on a chain. He opened it and looked at the woman painted inside, black hair, black eyes, a faint smile, but he could not reconcile this with the picture in his mind. It was not her, and it made him desperate.

Again he thought of the girl who had spit on him, asleep in her bed now somewhere in this great dark alien house and again her tears burned in his eyes. He felt something so strange in this; did she cry his tears? All the tears he had never felt, is this where they had gone?  
He heard a sound behind him on the stairs, a sharp creak of the wood which made him start and drop the locket.

He did not turn to look but he knew it was her. He heard her breath, the rustle of her gown, an unraveled hem brushing the steps, all these things magnified tremendously in the still night, and she smelled like the purple fields he had ridden through with Mr. Earnshaw, of earth and wool and apples. She sat down next to him and he tried to gather himself against the wall, anticipating some species of retribution for the strike she had received from her father, but there was nothing. She bent forward and the tendrils of her hair brushed his arm and he heard her retrieve the locket and didn't care.

She asked his name and he answered in his own way, so neither of them understood. Each thing she asked him, precious few as they were met with the same response. He could not make her understand him if he had wanted to. Taxed and weary as he was she offered one more; examining the little picture she inquired into its identity, then guessing herself, to herself for she had already determined he wouldn't understand, she asked why the lady had not come.

What did she see? Did she see the tears before he even felt them? She pinched him hard enough on the cheek so he drew his breath in sharply. It was only then that he turned to look at her and he now thought of the carved angels he'd seen in cemeteries. Not the glorious forms with their delicate hands and ominous wings, but the small stone figures overlooked in the far overgrown corners, these often accompanying unmarked graves and the graves of children.

She kissed him where her fingers had left a red weal, and if he had ever been kissed in his life, he could not remember it then. She rose and made to go up the stairs, but paused and waited until he understood, he must follow.

She took him to her room, a strange construction of sliding doors, secret drawers and windows, and from a hidden cabinet in the wall produced a wooden box. She took the locket and added it to the contents of this box. He saw for only an instant the odd collection within, although he would come to know it intimately later; Feathers and bones and rocks, as if she were some tiny shaman practicing in secret.  
He slept with her that night, in that queer little chamber hidden in the wall; whose high doors with transoms like the windows on a carriage blocked out the moonlight from the rest of the room, and concentrated it there in full brilliance.

How often they read by that light until the small hours of the night, how often it threw their shared dreams into sharp relief against grim backdrop of the waking world. He slept next to her that night, and every night after until their thirteenth year. She gave him his name, and then he had no other name, she ordained the day of his birth, so he was not born until she willed it, and she loved him so, that love was not articulate without her.

-  
The last month at sea visited him with atrocious nightmares, things he dared not to recount to himself even in the light of day. Once he watched himself, yet while remaining within himself, as a ghoul wandering through the kirk yard on a winter night. Searching blindly for something, knowing not what but that he could not know, he at last found himself on his knees digging at the stiff earth with his bare hands, working himself into the depths of a grave whose memoriam time had obscured .

He could feel the spongy peat, the slime of mud, the bite of pebbles and thorns against his palm, the scrape of pine beneath his nails and in a fever of ecstasy, outrage and revulsion he began working loose the rotten planks of a coffin. Exquisite delirium; the flesh of his hands was torn and he heard the hiss of his own blood falling on the frozen wood. As dreams will do, dreaming within themselves, even the cloud of his breath formed phantoms, cruel vignettes out of familiar shapes evolving and dissipating in maddening cycles.

Whatever was beneath him, it mattered not what world it existed in, for once he had attained it, it would be his forever. This notion encompassed him, but any further progression was arrested by piteous wail rising from the grave itself. He awoke in a cold sweat, feeling the sound in his own throat, though it seemed to disappear and not be there at all but above him in the wind shrieking through the sails. Alas it was in Ireland, not a week ago that the last of these, coming in on the Atlantic winds, the very breath of the northern plains, set him astray once more.

So close was he to her again he could nearly feel her physically, the familiar warmth of her displacing the sepulchral chill of the night wind with the scent of linden and saxifrage. It was natural he should dream of her, as he dreamed of her so often, and that the dream might take on a peculiar singularity due to, the tangible realization that in a insignificant span of hours, days he would once again be with her.

The cataclysm visited on him had no resemblance to any dream he'd ever known, perhaps only if one tallies up the fancies of a drugged or a mad mind into one event; but he would swear to God or to anyone that this had been no phantasm.  
The first night in Belfast, weary of the ship and the interminable journey that had begun in Louisiana, he sought shelter elsewhere. He found nothing but a few humble inns, and inhospitable cottages, whose cronish proprietors hastened to turn their signs on first sight of the imposing black figure entering their vicinity.

He could have well afforded to eschew such impromptu rejections, for further on there were places much more suited to such a gentleman and his wallet, but he wanted none of it. He wanted refuge in a most unassuming place; an obscure corner with a candle and a window framing the moon; he wanted a bed, one which afforded him in it's expectancy a measure of space he did not need as yet.

To lie all night alongside a snowy expanse of linen; a field as tenebrous in its shadows as the moors in winter and conjure her there, or rather let her happen; to come and be again for she was, barring imminent distractions, ever present around him in all forms.

Longing often rendered her in such detail he could in one breath experience the most exquisite pain and dissolving pleasure imaginable. Her posture in sleep, the artless arrangement of her hair, its sepia waves resplendent, as dark as his own in the half light, the flow of them obscuring sweetly things his imagination could not quite fill in yet; soft rises and nebulous plains, the landscape of a distant planet, untenanted and unaware. Her pale fingers curled beneath her cheek as she floated just above abandon, her face kissed only by the enfolding darkness, a map of capricious dreams.

Night, because it must without experience and without proof, passes over the particulars of desire and leaves the mystery for time; So approaching dawn found her there still beside him sleeping, still tender still unaware yet changed; flushed, infused with the warm color of the new sun; damp tendrils of her hair falling across her forehead, the rise and fall of breath and pulse as sounding as the ocean. He had seen once only with his living eyes such rise of color, like mad roses blooming, in the quickening of respiration.

-  
He found the place he sought, although not quite as pristine as his imagination. Paper on the window obscured a view of the sky and the candle was a rusted lantern, but there was a fireplace free of dust and the bed with its double space. An attendant came and insisted on starting the fire, but Heathcliff did not need him. He only wanted to be alone .The servant looked as if he would put forth an argument right away, until he recognized two pounds shut into his palm and another to insure his absence until morning. So he was alone. He felt as if he had not slept in five years. And in truth he hadn't. Not as others slumber, deep and oblivious.

He fixed the fire himself, until it was in danger of becoming a conflagration and little room blazed in hellish warmth. He bolted the door and meant to undress to his bare skin before he lay down, but didn't. This was something he could never do and never would, for even in his shallow sleep he remained on guard.

Still the heat of room excused him somewhat and he at last lay down in only his wool trousers as he had meant to, facing the empty space beside him.  
He woke once, or thought he woke to the pale green sweetness of linden flower, and heather. It's presence was overwhelming, an annunciation arousing all his senses, so much so that he moaned in his sleep, calling her name and the sound of it stirred him into full consciousness; but what consciousness. He felt her beside him in the stifling room; she lay next to him and he perceived her just as sure as his own body on the bed, the weight of his arm defined by her form beneath it and then even as he moved to bring her against his heart she slipped away.

He found himself in the kirk yard again, where only nights before he had dug the earth so frantically. It was bright daylight, though muted by thick fog that seemed to creep around from all sides and approaching the chapel he heard voices from within, the monotonous drone of a sermon punctuated by odd silences. Drawn inside despite a sick apprehension he saw something he hardly believed, as impossible in dreams as reality. In the cold light streaming across the altar stood Cathy, not as she had looked before, but older as she would be now. The changes were barely perceptible, perhaps only something his eye could see, but startling nonetheless.  
More startling still was that she was not alone. Always, always he met her alone in his dreams; strange how some details have the very quality of that fog, gathering awareness slowly.

She wore a pale gown, a pearl colored thing which floated around her like a bilious cloud and the creature next to her was equally attired in fallow garb, a shade which matched his skin and the color of his hair. Edgar. The years had changed him as well, if only by taking what viscera he had once and turning it to milk.

He tried to shout, but the effort evaporated, and as if she had heard this she turned about looking for the source. Did she not see him there? Her distress told him she did not, though she moved towards him down the aisle, calling his name. She was drawn back promptly to her vows, though her attention remained elsewhere. He called her name but could not approach her; he was rooted there like a tree. The reverend droned on eternally, the indecipherable hum of the dogma rising and falling like the terrible heart of a monstrous machine.

At last Catherine faltered. Her vitality dwindled by the minute until, unable withstand her own consuming fragility she slumped against the arm of her cold groom and fell to the floor. No one took notice but himself, No aid came to her. In fact the entire hideous scene simply dissipated around her. They were alone in the chapel; now he found her, and gathered her from the floor into his arms. She may as well have been a ghost or a cloud, having no more substance than the gown she wore. In desperation he pleaded with her attempting to rouse her, but there was nothing for it. Her hands, her face, had wasted to nothing and somehow he wanted to berate her for it.

What dream? Good God. His throat was hoarse when he awoke, jolted back into the flickering obscurity of the sweltering chamber. He felt like someone in the grip of a horrible palsy, the entire room swaying as if he were back on the ship.

Anger quickly surpassed any lingering terror, for this singular form of torment, though rare was nothing new. It was her again for she could orchestrate at will images in his head, she could speak to him and often did throughout their lives without words; but on occasion if she was contrary or a falling out made him feel trite and sullen, and she would rile his psyche by twisting his dreams into the most provoking shapes.

Remembering this now, he gave no credit to the dream, but that she had sent it. Like the doggerel of a ridiculous melodrama, it was her way, to use these theatrics to ape and mock the world.

He could not believe for an instant she had married Edgar, despite her stated intentions. Even as he escaped into the night with her words boiling in his blood; she was a liar and she would pay for the inconstancy. He knew this, while darkness overtook him, and the rain turned the moor to treacherous slime beneath his feet as he ran that if she had not broken his heart yet, he had surely broken hers. He did hear her that night calling him,calling until her voice gave out. Long after the downpour and the thunder had killed all other sound her voice followed him. Until he left England behind on ship bound for America, and even then...

Still this vision disturbed him; there was a quality in her discomposure that did not belong to a dream, and the trappings of the thing had been tactile enough, so he felt their sure presence on his skin, through his senses and in his hands long after he awoke. Nevertheless, he planned on forgetting it splendidly.

Though he rarely drank, abhorring any dulling of the mind, he determined that perhaps it was the only effective way to abolish the remnants of the nightmare. Until he touched her again, her hands, her face and felt her close and knew she would never again be absent from his side, he wanted to think of her as little as possible, if it meant he would not be tormented by useless agitations.  
With hours still left to the night, he sought out a tavern not far from his room making good, though he was methodical, on his oath.

The brandy was black and sweet as death, but after awhile it had no taste at all and he was downing it by the tumbler full. He hadn't decided yet whether he liked being drunk or not...but he'd at least succeeded in putting her out of his mind for the night. Thoughts of her as color and form and word ceasing, so what remained of her was a dull ache throbbing through his veins.

Someone was sitting near him, speaking to him and he was answering without thinking. This eventually was a conversation of sorts whose only purpose seemed to be to attract yet more errant discourse.  
Out of this incoherence [and he sensed a delicious hysteria coming on, because the crowd had begun to look like stunned fish and the floor was tilting, and each time it tilted the fish surged this way or that in confusion.] A single figure not much older than himself approached, addressing him in accents that were at once familiar and unpleasant.

The stranger's voice rose above the din like a hammer ready to strike, and before Heathcliff found his own tongue to speak, and repel the intruder, it smote him with full force.

'There's a Lad from Yorkshire...Gimmerton, proper' "He announced to the insensate throng "Imagine it, only recently departing not a fortnight since, my own home, just to find a brother in this place, amazing!''

Still, the young man with his fine clothes and his strange mien, certainly not native to England, but perhaps the east, Spain or even the Godless plains of America, did not fully comprehend his part in this

''How do you recognize me then, _brother_? I've not been at Gimmerton-''

''Not been? Why there's a born native for certain who denies it in such accents''

Heathcliff, inebriated as he was somehow found it amusing, fascinating, and horrible at once that he should be connected to that place by a dialect after traveling half the world to forget it. ''What's your business with me then?"

The man, worrying a roll of papers back and forth in his hands spoke hesitantly now, as if he were hiding something or had a case ready to put forth, but thought better.

''None sir...only, if you'd been abroad long a breeze from home might be a welcome distraction.''

''I'd never wish to be so distracted, if it meant my life, thank you'' He'd been watching the floor and when he looked up the stranger was gone, leaving his wad of papers. Heathcliff meant to fling them aside out of sheer annoyance just to watch them scatter, but instead he unrolled them, flattening them out against the table like a volume of rusty maps. What were they; a disorganized collection of flyers clippings and bills, all identifying Yorkshire, and Gimmerton.

Linton-Earnshaw  
Catherine Earnshaw to Edgar Linton  
1st April 1783-Gimmerton chapel

He would never remember leaving the tavern, or how he made his way back to that room just as the sun rose, or how once there he shut himself up in such abject darkness, without food, or drink or air for three days, only keeping that paper in his fist until it became pulp. A single vision that had often haunted him these last two and a half years came again, splashed in horrid brilliance across the black scrim.

_I stand at a scaffold facing a jeering crowd and I feel nothing, no injustice, no sorrow no fear until I see you, accusing, mourning where I cannot mourn for myself, and then the loss is incalculable, because it is yours. What have we done, what have we done? _


	2. Benediction

If there were one memory he could choose to obliterate,one which represented grief so exquisitely that quashing it would mean the end of grief altogether,He might first scrutinize every action from the time he was thirteen:but at last it would be this,a single moment from his sixteenth year,and Catherine's fifteenth

A fortnight before he ran there was a reprieve of sorts. He had been ill,a dogged malady that he could not conceal and it had drawn her to him. He hated this with a gall so bitter it turned his world black,but too enervated to argue he let her have her way. For the duration,the Linton's were forgotten,or more specifically, Edgar, for he had abandoned his incommodious chaperon citing a wearisome temper. Isabella was wearisome all around as far as Heathcliff went,but her shrill patter and absurdly vapid interjections were a satisfactory foil to any advances toward Cathy.

He came only once during Heathcliff's two week confinement,but was repelled at the door by Hindley, who was far gone and Catherine did not trouble herself as usual with chasing him down.

Suddenly,she was by his side again,a constant,rising up fiercely against Hindley's wicked fulminations and any interference from Nelly. She brought him back,no worse for the ordeal,but for what?  
With all of his strength blighted he fought the compulsion not to keep her at arms length,not to fall at her feet in a torrent of foolish affirmations and petitions. Holding fast he recovered though it irked him,knowing how easily his own senses might betray him .The fever,the pain the reverberations of delirium,all these were forever equated with the stilled exaltation her touch imparted.  
He soon settled back into his degradation,his boorish posture as comfortable now as an old blanket. He was well and as free from her as he could be again. Free from her thriving pretension,the hubris of a dull Cassandra squawking out prophecies and the presence of an alien creature trussed up in silks and stupid words. All this for the benefit of one who could never though his very life might depend on it comprehend anything for the artifice.

Yet he missed her again,longed for her terribly and hopelessly. After two weeks night and day in her company,where,despite the malaise and the helplessness they were at ease as before, Her sudden absence was like a wound. He assured himself in time it would wan,or was in the process of assuring himself, as he had still not been able to fix on any reason why it should.  
Intent on avoiding her while this weakness reigned over him,his pilgrimages away from home became increasingly formative. It was impossible to be any place that did not belong to her, so he resolved to frequent at least the most remote and inhospitable regions of their fallen kingdom. But if he was wayward she was relentless.

Thus she found him,not in any of their shared haunts,but on a stone in Blackhorse marsh,as if he were one of the inky creatures who dwelt there. She came only as herself ,so disarming him there was no hope in any strategy he could invent . They spoke few words and mercifully none of them related to anything current. Standing above him gazing out across the acrid flora of the swamp,She recalled with distant longing events of a former life,before the death of Mr Earnshaw, musing over these small things as if their very echo offered a promise of return. inconsequential,yet precious all the same. They made him ache for those days despite himself.  
He kept his gaze lowered, answering only in brief quiet syllables of approbation,for conversation could be volatile and he did not wish for another scene. It was enough he saw what she saw as always; past the pointless yearning,to the plains beyond just recently purple with heather,stretching endlessly above the dark blur of the marsh; to where they ascended toward the hills holding sunlight long after the heights and the rest of the valley were cold in shadow.

If she was not sanguine,at least she was kind now. In vain she sought evidence that she had enticed him out of his gloom,but he was stoic;and she herself was burdened,though what she suffered would not lend itself directly to expression. Even as she attempted to coax him out,her inquisition was checked by sighs and silences. Only in reflection did he distinguish the variance.  
Finding he would not meet her gaze fairly, she at last knelt in front of him seeking to arrest his faculties,as in old times with a kiss. If too droll, too often they still served well for reparations;but this accolade delivered with its pressing warmth such sober resolve, he could not help but respond by raising his head in astonishment.

Here she met him with yet another ;a questioning softness against his own unyielding mouth. There was a moments respite while she drew back,trying to read his eyes which he kept averted toward anything;His own hand clenched against his knee,a tangle of furze nearby, a solitary curlew wheeling upward toward a line of dark clouds. He hardly dared to move,feeling the world would fracture and disintegrate around him; but she pursued and persevered.

He felt his will abandon him in a rush,and so disburdened from it his senses rising,almost delirious in their potency. Supplanted by the respiration of the evening even his breath seemed not his own. Inhalations of sky, clouds black with rain and the sting of electricity in the air; the sultry earth all moss and roots, verdure and stone. Even the distant folds,damp wool, feculence and the kirk with its stagnant chapel, tortured oaks clambering bilberry and death beneath, beset him with an intoxication.

In this uproar of sensation he took hold of her,though prudence threw before him the barriers of any novice. He had her firmly by the arms,not having the audacity to to embrace her,or let himself be so in this present state of mind.Yet he could feel her blood flowing through his own,her lips were parted against his so he tasted in her kiss the tumult of her thoughts. Their breath mixing, deafening as thunder,flowing out into the descending night seemed to rouse every sleeping thing He could hear the dissonance of even the least creatures,arising from dreams lost forever.

He could not long withstand the indifference of his own hands,and so releasing her,the two of them were at once vines. His own body was merely an echo of hers;his hands committed to her all the desire he understood ;born from the weight of her hair,the surprise of her bare skin where found in such modesty; her aerial form more and more the only solid thing as it became by degrees indistinguishable from his own.

Gradually he was aware of a fatal shift within their shared design;The power of it terrified him,knowing reason was never inherent in either of them;but dull layers of wool,muslin and corduroy were a suffocating temperance and though he abhorred the cumbersome drapery, it was all that kept them from courting ruin. If she had been as those sun warmed caryatids soft in white cotton...but there was nothing for it. How would they remain thus,indefinitely without having to answer for themselves? and if he let her go, she would be gone completely. Within the hellish confines of home There would be no following to the benediction ,and here the damp ground was already soaking them,and in minutes the rain would come and finish it. The first night winds had caught them already,and her hair and her cloak flowed over his,so to the silent invisible observers of the marsh they must have looked like a great black bird of ill omen.

Yearning was acute;He, loving her with such constance that sometimes in thinking of her,he must remind himself to breathe,was perhaps far more versed in his objectives than she. Having nothing to do in his imposed exile but comprehend the depth of his longing; to him the facilitators of dreams seemed astoundingly prosaic when held up to the dreams themselves,but he understood the necessity ;that he hadn't't the means to attain them was almost insignificant;but It would be,must be somehow,because to part from her entirely was unthinkable.  
A space of perhaps seconds,would become interminable ; his mind cruelly taking in a thousand details, Some only arising under provisions of night in mad dreams that left him spent,or weeping. Opiate;her expression,the length of her, her strong legs; even through muffling layers of cloth, the fine concordance of muscle and bone against his as they knelt on the uncertain earth, was a sleight of Eros The soft weight of her arms counterbalance with a nearly imperceptible downward pull. The pale shadow curving from the hem of her blouse, the violence of her pulse against his lips, his fingers on her face; _her face.  
_  
Past endurance passion was a dumb moth beating its wings against a flame,turning his thoughts compulsively against him. Night was changeable, too brief and half spent in dreams, but tomorrow was a dread certainty from which there was no escape. Edgar would call and she would receive him,as usual Dismissing _himself,_as if nothing had transpired. There she would be once again,in her ridiculous attire, a flutter of ribbons and silly curls, serving tea and cake on china and silver they never used. He imagined they would look far less appealing presented on the chipped earthenware which served the rest of the family when the _master _was done crashing it from the cupboards. Heathcliff often placated himself with the singular vision of Edgar in the trajectory of those hurling dishes dancing and ducking in an ridiculous minuet.

God how he hated these intrusions! The instant Hindley made himself scarce;so much so,he almost preferred the torment of his infernal presence. Her affected speech ,her stilted physiognomy were bad enough and Edgar's soft voice and flaccid white hands lingering about her; but worse still from his post in the stable he could see them say their farewells and she aware of him in the shadows,would drop all pretense and seek out his position with a most accusatory gaze,as if this terrible business was entirely his doing. She would then exile herself directly to her room, from which he was forbidden now,and stay there until Hindley came back,throwing the house into chaos.

These thoughts,once entertained without mediation allowed him the fortitude to sever their entanglement;and he did so with chilling alacrity. The maneuver was an extinction of warmth and light that made him shiver miserably, gripping his vitals in an iron vice,so he felt as if he were sick again. He held her asunder,not quite at arms length and he could not speak. He saw his his soul,his pride,his right with such abysmal tenderness,the only remedy if he was to survive,was to become as cold and hard as flint;but her face,her face!  
She had been struck surely. A turn of expression which forbids scrutiny was checked in it's brilliance,and now clouds obscured her features,as sure as they claimed the horizon.

The florid heat which had so softened her faded to a livid phosphorescence,as if her face drained of passion was only a mirror of the evening sky. For a moment her features so convulsed,the raised brow and parted lips, confusion in her eyes turning to quick, hard tears, seemed the very mask of tragedy;But more quickly it was gone;her eyes burned but did not melt. She said his name, such a soft exhalation he thought he only imagined it,and then by degrees collected herself drawing gradually away from him.

He stood abruptly,breaking their embrace and she rose in tandem like his shadow,her arms falling to her sides in a final involuntary gesture of despair. She pleaded for him to turn around,demanded it,what had she done? He answered with cruel things,flippant absurd ,tossing them back at her like stones as she trailed him out of the marsh. But their rapid pace,and the rising wind nullified his words for the most part She called out to him once or twice more but he did not answer

They covered the two miles home in less than an hour. So intent was he on outdistancing her that even her long stride could scarce keep up,and they closed the distance at a breathless trot. When they reached the house,the sky was still dusky. Hindley was nowhere,and likely would not be back until dawn,and Ellen had already taken Hareton to sleep and extinguished her light;but it was insignificant. She turned to him as if she would touch him again,but he moved out of reach,turning toward the stable and soon after he heard the house door slam,as sounding as the door of a tomb.

The accidental peace lasted until daybreak,so all night he lay awake; No distractions but the wind and rain and the stirring of the horses in their stalls;But every extraneous sound was as keen as a dagger through his battered senses. Over and over he strained toward the outer darkness sure he could distinguish her step,Or was sure he heard her in the kitchen,singing softly as she often did to Hareton. But he would not go to her, though it killed him. He knew she was not there anyhow, not approaching,not restlessly roaming the house. She was upstairs alone in her narrow bed,but exiled from sleep just as he was. He could see her just as sure as he saw his own hands,and the pale square of a window above him. She sat at the open casement resting her cheek on her arm oblivious to the rain blowing in,wetting her sleeve,laying a fine mist across her hair.

He tried to find words,one thought to explain how this struck him;There was nothing adequate. What came to mind were the serials Francis brought with her from London,the secret box stowed away in a corn crib. He and Cathy had found them by accident and spent hours pouring over the diabolical texts, Until they were caught by Joseph,who nearly beat the life out of them on Hindley's instruction.  
Stories strung together with gore,betrayal,torture.Humanity was eviscerated, forsaken and people pined and plotted and they mourned,but never long enough;and they_burned_. That was the word. It tasted right on his tongue,simple enough. He burned as if he'd been set adrift on a sea of fire,because he could not touch her. Again something as fragile,but tangible as glass separated them,and they were inconsolable. Again he saw her stricken face turning to marble,the seraphic calm of a statue guarding a tomb. Still his hands echoed her likeness and his body grieved hers; the dissolution was a mortal bruising.

If he rued his own exacting retreat-and he did he would give no credit to it immediately;but nothing was gained.;no victory. Despair beset in him a species of madness. He knew just as sure as he had witnessed the transformation in her,and that she would _not _,that if she came to him again so unguarded, if she came as she often did in the dead of night he would not be the same.

They could hide, stealing time in the brief respite from Hindley's tyranny,hostages of a strange hush, _don't speak love,don't cry out,don't say my name,steady your pulse,your breath,keep your voice below the wind_ _else he will hear us,wherever._ They could run,run so far as to be out of his mind and hearing forever;but how far would her boots go before the soles were worn hopelessly through? He saw her at a fateful distance,across the crowds of a dirty street, a dispassionately seeking him out through the relentless flux of strangers,loveliness beclouded; big with the child he would never see,feet black with the dust of the road.

For the second time he saw in her his absolute. The first was a lifetime ago, the night they were apprehended at the grange and he had been cast out into the night without her. They'd been one,without a thought, running,tumbling over one another in a warm heap, until they suddenly found themselves besieged,facing the lights of the grange,and in an instant she was gone,and he had never been so cold in his life. Hoisting himself back up into a window,he was afforded a direct view of her,ablaze in an extravagance of candlelight,the Linton's flitting around her like pallid moths; a small queen besieged by ghosts she was,and seeing her for the first time at such a distance,separate from himself,he had never wanted so much to be beside her.

They combed her hair and he felt a wave of jealousy and devotion strong enough to take his breath away. He'd never particularly noted it's color before,it was simply dark,as his;But now he saw it's oak and agate, umber and russet caressed and unraveled to its natural waves within the Linton's bloodless hands. As if it never occurred to him,he remembered suddenly the feel of it across his face as they slept in the enclosed bed;soft tangles. Nelly said the fairies had been in it,and sometimes he stayed up after her, watching, waiting to catch them. He would give the tiny prisoners to her one by one,and she would become their queen.  
He knew the reflection of light on the glass prevented anyone from seeing out,but he believed she could see him all the same,for occasionally,in the fray,her gaze wandered to the exact spot where he was.

He felt at any time,like someone waking from a dream gone astray,that she would soon beg out of her prison. And if they would not let her out he'd take the palace apart brick by brick until she was free. But she did not. Looking his way once more she fell into a resigned contentment as the lifeless clambered around her. He could not move her, touch her, and only hope she did not call out for him, so he left her there That he was beaten,for his part in the folly,sanctioned abominably ,was inconsequential. If she was gone,nothing could effect him..He had an almanac,and crossed off every day,days into weeks,until every mark became a sentence of execution,and in the end,almost unable to feel physical pain any longer he dashed them off in his own blood.

Again he had left her,and again,she was unreachable. He felt her arms around him again,the verdancy,. the warmth of her breath in the cold summer night. A thousand sensations overflowing his own,her laughter,now usurped once more by her voice in exchange with Edgar's; her absences her coolness.

He had drifted off,at the cusp of daybreak,but his suspended conscious was plagued by an atrocious pounding,the drums of the Apocalypse which he mistook for his own pulse. Coming fully awake to a miserable ache throughout his entire being,he realized the truth of it. Hindley had come home,no better for his absence.

Entering the kitchen , forgetting to stable the horse,who stood in the yard lathered and suffering from a dreadful limp with the reigns trailing the ground, Earnshaw was at once engaged in dispute with Ellen. Though he could not discern details, Heathcliff knew them by rote. Ellen defending her charge against his fathers reckless advances,fruitlessly,for he would have the boy regardless. Even if he did not suffer a broken neck,he would be sufficiently terrified as to hold the attentions of the household hostage for days with his anxieties. Even now his ceaseless wailing rose above the stridency of the argument.

He marveled at the brats hardiness;how others with far more advantages and less trepidation could not withstand a breeze without suffering the blows of mortality,and Hareton,without one,natural or given possessed the fortitude and the ingenuity of a Hun. He admired the creature despite paternity,and to the abstract, _due_ to the lineage as well. For the Child's likeness was so precise to Catherine's,it stirred sentiments in him he could not accurately decipher. He rarely saw the father in the boy,but instead saw himself in the impassive,dejected countenance,and yet it was Catherine's soft dark eyes gazing from that countenance, Catherine's tousled sable hair tweaked in the grubby fingers. Catherine.

He determined to make his escape before Hindley's attention was turned elsewhere. He knew Cathy would not follow him into the fields because of Josephs imminent presence. She would no longer be chastised on his behalf as she once had, and her own accountability now seemed a subject too sensitive to approach. Josephs reports concerning the two of them were an intrusion beyond endurance as far as Catherine went.

Heathcliff looked back once before he left the yard. The first rays of sunlight glinting off the windows played tricks with his vision. He saw her above just visible in the aperture of her casement,as in old days when he would come to throw fir cones at the glass and bring her down from her tower. He knew how she hid and watched letting him brood until he had nearly given up,turning his back to go. Only then she'd fling open the glass,shouting his name. How could she have known,he would have never gone. Had she held out she would have had only to look for him beneath the fence or by the currant bushes three yards distant; but the light shifted, subject to clouds even in it's first promising beams and she was gone The window was fastened as it had been.She had never been there,but lay asleep at last,exhausted from tears which burned themselves up before they were ever spent,her arm as always,stretched across the narrow empty space beside her.  
He turned away,heading toward the fields,to the end of the world. But still he was not really gone.

_I love you. I hardly know what love is but to see you in the distance and feel i am there,and not within myself. I hate you;I hate you for leaving me to be someone else. I hate myself because I want you,because I need you more in your strangeness than I did when we were indistinguishable; But I love you,God only knows how. I died when I hurt you,A thousand times,and I wanted to lay in your arms and let you comfort me. If you are a stranger to me,then I am all the more a stranger to myself .and if there is only us in the universe,it is all well,even so,for everything exists in you._


	3. Home

It is a long way from Liverpool to Gimmerton. Almost as interminable as the two years of his truancy; And now there is a dread accompanying him. More than dread,but finality.  
Twelve years passed,he had come this same way with Mr Earnshaw and felt the same dread,something unnameable invading his soul. He was only six then and barely articulate and he felt as if it would crush him, though the old man was kind.

He talked of a boy and a girl;when he spoke of the boy his voice was clipped and somehow frightening,but when he spoke of the girl his voice softened,though not with sympathy,it put him at ease. He barely understood what the man said, the words were alien,but he understood the softness,the ease which accompanied a name. Cathy.

''Here now" Mr Earnshaw offered when Heathcliff showed fear of his horse "I have bought this for miss Cathy because she is a champion rider,and no older than you. You may give it to her yourself when you see her,if you will be brave" and he put a black leather whip in his hand,and he was no longer afraid of the horse,but in awe of this Cathy child who had the courage to ride such a beast on her own.  
So she waited still. Someone he knew,but did not know .It would not be the changes time wrought,for at seventeen the rough edges of childhood naturally softened. She would be in the full realization of her own beauty but beauty arrested,shamed by contrivances and conventionalities. She was someones wife now, _his_ wife,Mrs Linton,and would never be Cathy again.  
They were all the same,these wives,whether well heeled or common, all seeming to disappear into the indifference of their husbands. Even if they managed a quiet content,he had never seen one as beloved as she would have been,exalted in that capacity as in all with himself.  
Mrs Linton wore her hair in a chignon. Indistinguishable from all others like her, Mrs Linton moved through a chronology of satin and velvet and lace,she had roses in her room red,undying cycles of roses,and this room reflecting itself endlessly in silver mirrors had a lock on its door which never found the necessity to be drawn;it would never be challenged by the oppressive chivalry of Thrushcross Grange.

Heathcliff,as he would let his fancy run riot. Mrs Linton,that excruciating after thought to his lost love occasionally discarded her adopted persona,shaking it off as she would shake autumn leaves from her hair,and the venue of her prison rose around her as it should,not a prison but a sovereignty under her command. hadn't't they imagined that once ? Ignis fatuus blazing in the dark.An empire of crimson and ivory and rainbow light in a stronghold on the out lands of Elysium where they ruled without censure. If they were too exuberant,there was but their own voices echoing off marble and glass,to castigate them. He was with her now in this forgotten place,and yet he wasn't't. His mind,his soul,his _anima_certainly, but again he could not reach her,having no body for her to recognize; and she ran ahead of him in joyful havoc.

It seemed a grievous injustice, for He knew in this brevity of shared vision,there was no one else but her and but himself. If he could catch her he would beg her forgiveness for the cruelty he had shown her in the marsh and for letting her spend the night alone with the rain soaking her head. Imagination would not pollute his desire with things it knew nothing of yet,still not yet. He only saw himself tangled in her arms again while she dismantled every abnegation,every battlement that owned him.

The numbness of reverie came easy enough with nothing to do but sit in the back of an airless coach,but on the last stretch of the journey he he began to think the conveyance too absurdly ostentatious,so he abandoned it in Leeds and took a horse instead. It was then that this dread,this ominous finality spread itself out before like a map,as clear as th north countryside unfolding in front of him.  
It had not even begun,yet was over. He had one goal now,To ruin Hindley,if he had not yet succeeded in completely ruining himself,and if not, if not to kill him fairly .To see her face once more whether it be contorted with contempt,shock or masked only with her prevailing dispassion,then to end his corporeal existence there.  
But he'd take caution not to look too long,for if he saw even the palest shadow of his love reflected he would certainly falter,and perhaps spend the rest of his days in a living purgatory where sustenance consisted wholly of the promise of it's static ghost, however fleeting.

It was twilight when he approached the southern edge of Gimmerton. Below him,the valley unfurled like like an Indian silk;Worn mauves and tourmaline ocher and indigo mapped in changing patterns of fragile light,uncertain illuminations swelling and fading and regenerating as fallen stars. Miles beyond it rose again,disappearing into a silvery haze. Above this, the hills climbing and dissolving into myriad shades of dusk, waited in an endless hush; a murmur like the constance of prayer.  
She was there,though he knew,far removed from their beloved home. Not in her bedroom window watching the sky,but in a window of the Grange perhaps,gazing out at this same scene,from the other side. Would the mist,and the darkness tell their secret. Could she feel him there,see him as he saw her?

The anticipation and the dread were almost too much to withstand. He meant to make the last of the journey that very night,though he was exhausted .He knew there was no sense in sleep,in rest. The only true respite now was death. Yet something kept him.  
Entering the streets of Gimmerton he felt disoriented,as if he were a child again,here for the first time and lost without a guide. Though nothing had changed he barely recognized a single building,the market stalls and the fields where the fairs set up in summer were all as cold as the landscape of the moon. It was a compelling sensation,but he felt,one to be taken as an omen;Of what he could not determine,for what dire warnings present themselves in such an untimely fashion.  
He took a room above Blacks tavern. There were a handful of other establishments more appropriate for someone of Heathcliff's station,but his subconscious with its own agenda,had drawn him there perversely,the momentum of his own plan beyond his will to alter.  
Just as a chill in the air presages a ghost,Heathcliff knew he would inevitably encounter Hindley; The black devil himself sitting at a corner table.  
Often he had come here with Mr Earnshaw, before the old man became too feeble to even reach his own doorstep. Missions of propriety he called them,imagining somehow his son's frequent truancies were nothing more than a lark,turned habitual for want of a firm hand;but the young master was already a virtuoso at fourteen. Having tried and played out his hand at cards and billiards to a grievous disadvantage long before his father even suspected his propensity for excess.

He was a quick favorite among the local plungers, a novel subverter, for he had singular approach to his own devastation. His means were largely disregarded,as was his inexperience.. If Young Hindley had a gold locket with a womans face painted in it,ten pounds in silk purse a diamond bracelet or even a horse,it was none of their concern where it came from,only that eventually he would lose it; but he did not capitulate typical to his order,for he was amazingly clever,and tenacious and while his senses were still about him he remained undaunted. The first hour at the table his pot increased exponentially;But it was only a matter of time before his wits did inevitably desert him. If he did not drink himself under the table, his last few pence were often thrown away on something worse,and then he was only the subject of the most unwholesome interests..

Only a child himself then,Heathcliff understood this _something worse _with far more intimacy than Mr Earnshaw. Later he wondered how the old man,certainly worldly enough to make his way about the denizens of Liverpool with ease,seemed oblivious to the debaucheries of his own neighborhood, much less his own family.

Often,in a most astonishing gap in judgment,he'd attest that Hindley was not in danger of being so wayward with the women of the town watching over him  
Heathcliff then knew very well the origins of all of Hindley's paltry trinkets. Most of them being small things procured from strongboxes and drawers at home. The source of the other,by lengths was worse, a formidable confidence he would not be fain to articulate even if he knew how, Although he imagined as he time passed the value of it would outweigh the embarrassment. He could have turned him in easily without troubling his conscience,but he planned on keeping these secrets until they ripened..  
These motherly women,some,under careworn physiognomies perhaps even too young for that,and others far gone for true-who hung about the men at the tables,were anything but that. These ladies who took to hovering about young master Hindley ,fingers in his inky curls,silently embattled for possession of a shoulder,or an arm if it was not engaged in throwing out cards,dissipated like a flock of rooks at the sight of Mr Earnshaw ducking through the doorway.

Before being spirited away,a species of this mesdemoiselles had been very familiar to him in the streets,the hostelry's and the public houses of the city. These ladies,with their tarnished paste jewels powdered hair and yellowed lace about the neck and wrists,he remembered better than his own mother,as often he was left as their charge.

They fancied most of all the pathetic dandies,some barely of age,who with empty purses and the absence of benefactors lingered about in moth eaten velvet, baiting people with plebeian charm and transparent intellect. The ploy was a solid one and these creatures were more often than not,able to win a small pot with the borrowed stakes. This evanescent wealth afforded them at least one night of fame,sometimes only hours, before they drank themselves into oblivion and it was always those venerable,tragic birds who took them in ultimately.

If there was no one to take responsibility for him, Heathcliff often had to sit outside their doors,sometimes through the night,sleeping on the floor of the hallway. Unless he stopped his ears he could hear them through the thin walls,the flow of indecipherable chatter interrupted by strange articulations,sighs and moans.

Many times he was the only one who saw how they left just before dawn,with small relics;a jeweled hair pin,a pair of pearl earrings,once dropped in front of him and hastily retrieved, coins such as they did not have before,and once or twice Heathcliff was the beneficiary of an excess tossed in his vicinity,scrabbling for the shiny token in the dim light before it stopped spinning on the dusty floor. Wanton little things,hardly of any value,but real. If these men looked his way,or bent to him in perfunctory conversation he occasionally saw a peculiar hollowness in their eyes,as if their heads were full of candlelight rather than brains.

It was no surprise to Heathcliff, his step brothers dalliances with such women,but something about it struck him as so appalling,he never even dared to to tell Catherine,whom he never kept secrets from.  
Certainly they were nothing more than whores,some with habits,opium,laudanum and other poisons wasting them away;still the remnants of former lives hung about them,some only evanescent, some tangible bits of small wealth,old deeds ,jewels,gold and silver pieces,but these things,as insipid as they were frequently the last vestiges of a life lost,or forgotten. Whoever they had been,it was broken up into these meager possessions.. It was these,whether given as unlikely tokens of affection,or pilfered outright which were the true center of Hindley's deviance.

He had all the confidence of these women,and if they were ever cognizant of their losses,it was beyond them to suspect this boy with his great black brown eyes. Hindley was not dunce enough to keep these things about his person,he bartered them elsewhere for currency, for other valuables. It seemed,it was not the money at all,but the idea that he could create absence. Gaining trust,he could subtract from them at will,and Heathcliff knew from experience the truth of this.

Indeed,the secret knowledge of these offenses,the idea that their accumulation would someday serve in his revenge as a beautiful flawless weapon,often buoyed him up and gave him the fortitude to withstand Hindley's increasingly ingenious methods of torture. Of course,true torment had not yet actuated itself,and genius soon found its element in horrid simplicity. In a few years Mr Earnshaw would be dead,without ever gaining intelligence of his sons true nature,and Heathcliff, separated from the only peace,the only wholeness he'd ever understood,would be torn in two.

The tavern was crowded,as usual for this time of evening;Men desperately trying to win something back before the night was over,the cacophony of heated diatribes, pleas and boasts rising and swirling upward into the dense air. The light,a feebleness of blackened lamps and and dying candles had a tarnished quality which created optical sleights,so now he was sure he saw Hindley, his square head inclined half conscious over a pile of cards; Saw him not just in one place,but everywhere he looked,just moving out of sight,or obscured by the crowd. Strange how the improbability of these visions occurred so subtly, why did the Hindley from long ago manifest in such detail?

There was work to do before he dared leave the confines of Gimmerton. Details of Catherine's marriage were the least of it,although as he infiltrated the tables,populated with old neighbors as well as strangers and breathed in the clouds of conversation floating there,he felt the overwhelming compulsion to manipulate the current,if just a little,only to hear her name. Whatever appellation she bore now.  
But Wuthering Heights,dark spot on the side of a green hill,was not news. Neither did any of its associations arise, as if it were only a figment of his imagination,and his careful questioning concerning the fates of it's various occupants,chiefly Hindley, met with wags of the head or blank exchanges. They talked of Crops, children,the inherent losses of winter,death,birth the status of a fold,a brood. Things which once connected him intimately with Wuthering Heights and now meant nothing,and even in their predominance he did not detect the faintest shadow of what he sought.

More compelling,though not by much,was the mention of an asylum in Gimmerton, anomalous for a small principality,but the population had increased twofold in the last year and a half,and with it,the percentage of mentally destitute,most of them victims of drink or opium,and they would not be taken in at Leeds. Often they were simply left on a road between here and there.

It was reputed to to be a formidable and uncompromising structure on the east end of town,with iron bars across every aperture and a watch tower,as imposing as any in London. The notion of it was almost amusing,for if he failed in his mission this is perhaps where he would spend the remainder of his days. After conquering the world he would languish to his end five miles from where his life began. How prosaic,the idea of dying shackled and bound in a madhouse when he had been incarcerated for so long by a little ghost.

He felt so sure that just by listening long enough,he would at last obtain a perfect map back to Wuthering Heights,a virtual picture of where each player stood in this last act,that he stayed until the late hours of the night,until further travel was unreasonable,and again the inevitable was postponed.

He assured his own quiescence once more that night. If he could have bashed his own brains out to do it he would have,but he preferred the silent and the slow effective drowning of every sense. The brandy,and the laudanum,enough to kill anyone less hearty were only insignificant tools,and after tonight he would have no use for them at all. He had his pistol,and this he knew,he believed this was the only honest means to an end.

To dream of her at all now would have meant defeat,her very proximity after such visions a disastrous upheaval to his plans. His only thought then being,to close the gap of impotent and endless night between them,to shake her from her own dreams and die there at her feet. If she recognized him with only despair or disgust,she still recognized him, still it was himself yet shaped in,and shaping her familiar features.

He was lucid enough to understand his approaching madness. He was insane,no one knew better than himself. Perhaps it was there from the beginning evolving with him. What he felt for Catherine was a thing without perimeters. Not feeling,only being,and when being was usurped by conventionalities,restrained and interrogated what was there to do in grim perspective,but categorize it.  
_Love_? Did he _love_ her? The word seemed ridiculously inadequate. So paltry he could never bring himself to utilize it. He might as well have been in front of a mirror mocking himself with it. _Love. Love. Say it a million times and it means less each time. this word cannot contain,nay even approach what feel for you. What I am for you. Perhaps,this loftiness was our downfall all along. There is no immortality. I'I've reached past you and beyond into nothing. Absolutely nothing and I am falling.  
_  
He thought of her stricken face again becoming a mask,and a mask becoming the face entirely until it was no longer a mask,and the last day he saw her,her disguise a model of cold perfection. This more than anything irked him,because he had meant to be contrite that day at last, but she was dauntless. Though he went further out of his way than he ever dared to keep her there;her comportment as well as her expression,a virago firing out insults and petty edicts,infuriated him. But ,he would have persisted yet,if her wretched company, the Linton's, who she still referred to in plural though they had long since devolved into a singular,had not arrived with disgusting punctuality.

Well,what was the use of these reflections. That wasn't't his Catherine anyhow;but she was there,as always,and oblivion could not take hold before she appeared again. He was was like some beached thing,a monstrous creature thrown up on the shore and exposed to cruel elements and waiting in utter helplessness for the tide to reach out again and take him back to sea.

He was weak now,undone by frustration,the confusion of the drugs,and the terrible endless longing. He cried then,he shook the little room with his grief,for the last time,but he slept at last and did not dream of her,or anything.

He set out for Wuthering heights early,but not as early as he had planned ,less than a two hour ride from town he would arrive there at midmorning. Perhaps Ellen,if she was still there would be outside at her chores already, so he would not have the immediate problem of confronting Hindley,whatever condition he might be in,or rut faced Joseph and his henchmen.

The short journey back did not go as smoothly as he'd anticipated. Compromised by the after effects of the laudanum,he felt as if he were slogging through some inhospitable enchantment,and his horse,still not rested from its trip out of Leeds,was contrary. He knew if he would not be sympathetic,neither would the beast. So he took the reigns and walked beside it for the duration.

As soon as his feet touched the familiar ground,his head cleared .It seemed even the horse understood the dearness of this place,lifting his head and smelling the soft air or snuffing at the earth for the first spring grasses. If this had been a joyful expedition,with someone waiting for him at the end of it,he might have taken his boots off to better feel every pebble, every indentation every blade of grass against the soles of his feet,affirming life as when he was a child. He'd absently gone back there again in an hour unguarded;the fresh green air and the bright,languid April winds so taking him that at last looking up,he was stunned to find himself on the hill,overlooking the House.


	4. Beatrice

Ed ecco un altro di quelli splendori ver' me si fece, e 'l suo voler piacermi significava nel chiarir di fori.Li occhi di Beatrice, ch'eran fermi

He stood for a long while studying the panorama before him. The house and the grounds slept in profound silence. Nothing stirred,not the animals in the yard,nor bird or human,and all about was obscured in a shallow brume,the ebb catching the pale rays of the sun and giving the illusion that the house itself floated above the mist. Here again was the shrouded Thule wherein his entire existence dwelt. It mattered not that she was now and forever absent from this place,by some enchantment or curse it resounded with her likeness. The starved and delicate branches of alder, bird cherry and hawthorn bent beneath the wind and still bare but for the remnants of a linnets nest or broken hive. The walls rising from the soft earth like an impenetrable fortress yet still helpless to the elements and the windows never letting out light ,only reflecting darkly the endless changes of the eternal sky.

The roar of his pulse, his heart pounding as if it would burst made him feel delirious. He tied the horse to a post at the end of the north wall,and sat for a moment in an effort to collect himself. Time was deceptive,unnatural. It washed the bright morning away in a torrent of dark blue summer rain and in a flash of lightening he was fifteen again, running into the night, water streaming in his eyes and the mud filling the holes in his shoes. He'd been struck and did not even know until much later. He screamed,he howled her name ripped from his soul,even as she cried his own into the storm,and the sound was swallowed by endless peals of thunder.

Coming back around to the present he felt no better,but he was calm and approaching the entrance he told himself he was no longer that boy;but the griffins and the shameless fauna gloating over the walk looked down at him as if they knew better. For three hundred years they had marked traverse on this threshold,gleaning from birth to death its secrets, it's prayers and errant whispers left at the door and the echoes,though lost to time and memory lay forever deep and abiding within their crumbling forms.

His entreaties did not illicit a response for so long he began to think they had all departed. Even the dogs did not answer to the rattling of the great door. He had just turned to try his luck at the back of the house when the portal flew open behind him,and a familiar figure,a spare flustered entity half covered in flour addressed him shortly. It was Ellen.

"Sir I have told you,the master is away and Miss-''

He turned about completely to face her and her rant died on her lips. He could think of nothing to say and the poor lady stood there in such a profound depth of confusion,it appeared she had gone dumb. Her hand went to her mouth and her brow furrowed and un furrowed,until at last it absorbed the picture presented to it.

''Nelly,do I look so strange?'' There must have been some distress in his voice for she did not retreat but seized his hands in hers.

''oh merciful heaven-what turn of the weather has sent ghosts walking!..it cannot be!'' she breathed.

''It is then'' he rallied ''You mustn't' stand there gaping. If we are alone let me in ,I have much to ask of you and no time.''

''Please forgive me..this has put me out of my head. We are alone but not long,come in then..oh Mr Heathcliff...you are so changed I am at a loss how to address you!''

She prattled on as they went through the house and gazing about,he hardly heard her. She was leading him to the kitchen as she did so often when he was a child,to that sanctuary where she had so often chided him and gained his confidences equally at her will.

Strange how he had so often dreamed the house in ruin,the decay they had begun after Mr Earnshaw's death complete; But here was a different picture entirely. He could almost believe looking at the fire, the freshly swept flags and the abundance of spring foliage decorating every corner,that happiness lived here. Then of course as they were wont to do his thoughts turned darkly toward an explanation,ugly enough to make the pleasant environment look once more like a festering charnel house. Perhaps this domestic perfection was but the remnants of a snare. He quelled this. It would do no good now to entertain these thoughts.

So he sat in the kitchen With Ellen,who could not help every few minutes or so expostulating in rapt amazement over the appearance of this new person before her. Her talk alternated queerly between the mundane and the silence of terrible apprehension. Joseph she said, had retired to his own cottage a half mile away, she then stopped short of embellishing this event with a reason. Mentioning again how she and Hareton got on fine without his or anyones interference, again she quickly diverted the subject.

He had absolutely no desire to recount or relive in words the particulars of his time away. The events,and the places and the people were a meaningless blur which amounted to one thing,the years without Cathy,and this equaled an unbearable pain. Still she was like a shrew rooting up prey hidden in the dirt,and would not relent until every morsel was overturned and its secrets digested.

He covered as briefly as he could without seeming suspect his last two years. How he had at first been for a soldier,had been wounded and nearly died of malaria in New Orleans. What he did not tell her was that,with a hatred,and a vengeance that he was impotent to carry out,he found instead in his person a protean genius, something which comes with amazing ease when one has no lineage or connections. With great skill he had passed himself off as American,and fought against his own adopted country.

He felt like a boy again,regaling her with his various injuries,and the scars they left behind,but in truth,he was working up the courage,trying desperately to frame his dire inquisitions. To ask of her,to speak her name again in this venue was the very next step unto mortality. He could see even in Ellen's welcoming prattle and her open countenance a hesitancy,a shadow of something waiting.  
Then inevitably it happened. Their gaze fell mutually upon something during a lull in the conversation,a certain window with a small table beneath it which had been his chief refuge once with Cathy.A hiding place from Joseph and Hindley in the blessed days long before Mr Earnshaw became so ill and peevish.

Now her ghost hung in the air between them and whether he was ready to hear or not,he must know how he had lost her. How had she left,,in tears? Or was she happy Either way he would be glad to hear no more after.

A clatter from the front of the house,a door opening and slamming and the rapid tattoo of footsteps across the stones arrested them. Quite suddenly Ellen was animated as he had never seen her before. Seizing him by the arm in complete trepidation,she practically flung him into the anteroom off the kitchen and admonishing him to stay silent there until further notice,added a something odd in the form of an apology. ''Heathcliff..forgive me..I only did not how to bring forward!''

Then it was,standing in the same shadows where he had died two years since,he felt his strength drawing away with the same acuity. It was like the sea sweeping the earth out from under his feet. It was her;her living presence,her voice replacing at once and out of nowhere his very existence. Rushing into the kitchen only yards from where he stood,she was real again,and though it was nothing of great import,this voice,so long absent from his ears was an annunciation.

''Ellen,is someone here? For there is a horse tied up by the north wall,and it has eaten a circle bare in the grass and chewed halfway through its tether. I should take it to the stable and give it water.''

Her voice was ragged and he knew she had been out riding all morning,hard as she did when she was beleaguered by something. Why was she here and not at the Grange?He could barely stand now,he winced,sucking in darkness in a long breath,but the darkness was dissolving.

He heard Ellen falter and

''Ellen what is the matter with you,what have you moved from that chair?''

He remembered that he had left his cloak there and for an instant was in peril,until realizing such an item fine as it was,would never be associated with himself . ''Miss Cathy'' Had she addressed her so? A slip of judgment as she rallied herself perhaps

''sit down for a minute..someone is here for you-'' '

''and should I sit for that..Ellen you are strange!'' ''Who would visit me?''she was losing her nerve by the second"

''He's come all the way from Leeds this morning''

''_He_ well where is _he _then Ellen?,show him in ,if he is anyone important-and why do you keep looking toward the stable?''

This was unbearable. he had not expected this and now was at a loss. Her words,her voice,so strange but so a part of him filled his head until he felt as if it would explode.

Unconsciously he had removed himself from the shadows and now stood at the entrance to the stable,half in and half out of a pillar of burnished sun. The voices from the kitchen continued,but fainter now. Some urgent plea from Ellen and then rooted there,his mind in exquisite chaos,he perceived in a coalescence of soft sound,breath,footsteps and changing light the arbitress of his soul.

It appeared at first she did not recognize him,but the folly was mutual for she was altered as surely as he was. She was not a stranger,only unreconciled with the ghost always in his thoughts. Her face,so livid radiated through the encompassing gloom,and her eyes absorbing it as they acclimated to it,became darkness itself. Wide, disbelieving.

''Show yourself to me'' She whispered,as if she were afraid to speak,and stepping forward,attempted to look beneath the blinding veil of sunlight separating them. He cleared it,and they met at the penumbra,a limbo he thought, stretching between heaven and hell.

Speechless, she held out her hand reaching to touch him,completely doubting even as he did his,her own senses.With her other hand behind her,she sought purchase on something which was not there.  
Finding her voice at once she cried out for Ellen,as if in the throes of a cruel dream,and she came running though a minute too late. Catherine turned,and fell to the floor in a senseless heap. It might have been silly any other time,for Cathy had never fainted in her life,if when surveying the scene for herself Ellen had not reacted with such alarm.

''Oh what is there to do now!" she cried ''I knew this was wrong,and now we are done for..come help me get her into the house quickly.''

Raising her in his arms,he noted with alarm that she weighed no more than a child. Oh but the sweet incoherence of the moment! This recumbent phantom with her head against his shoulder lived and breathed and he could no longer dispute the reality of it,and yet he felt like an intruder,a thief who had entered unaware and robbed her of everything.  
Together they brought her around again,but Ellen had dosed her with a noxious philter good for quelling nerves,or so she said,and she did not open her eyes.

''She has been very ill sir,and only recently recovered enough to seem herself'' He demanded why she did not warn him,so he might have not surprised her so. He could not help hating her just then,always holding her tongue when she should speak,and speaking when she she be silent. But he remembered after all he was the stranger here,and his odd demeanor must have put her off. She saw this suppressed fury,turmoil he could never hide obscuring his brow like a black cloud. ''There is much I have not told you Heathcliff,and I am sorry,but you must remember that you left us,and the consequences are yours to face".

She took her leave then,returning to her chores in the kitchen and he was alone with Cathy, unconscious on the settee'. He sat in a chair across the room,a tumult of panic and ecstasy beating in his breast. Who would come through the door next and find this scene?Her husband certainly,or Hindley, and now he was ill prepared to deal with either. On reflection he thought it disconcerting that Ellen had not mentioned them.

Not withstanding her present condition,Cathy had inherent in her person a heartiness which defied any soporific panacea. Heathcliff knew this by unfortunate experience. One winter,stricken with ennui and vengeance they had holed up in the cellar and plotted to drastically reduce Hindleys supply of wine,what was left of Mr Earnshaws fine collection,by replacing it with water and woodruff tincture. But opening each bottle, of which there were some twenty remaining,they found they could not obliterate them without tasting every one first,for each one was different. Some had trees in them, some had apples and moss,horehound,even roses and copper.  
So they could not stop,tasting and destroying,until they were giddy and sick,or at least,he was. Catherine held her own although not without a certain amusement at her counterparts discomposure. And they made plans for true retribution then,before he fell asleep with his head in her lap.

Unable to wake him up,she'd drug him up the cellar stairs,and up the house stairs to her room somehow without anyone seeing,and when he woke up sick she bribed and threatened and cajoled until Ellen agreed to a series of fabrications designed to keep Hindley at a safe distance. It worked,so well that stayed the night unconscious beside her in the oak bed. Even in Oblivion there is bliss.  
But they were nearly fifteen then and it would have been no good at all. Perilous indeed to wake with her there, the morning sun across them like a blanket. When she came to him at night and they lay together on his pallet in the stable,he was safe,but here he had no defense. So he left her before dawn, climbing out the window and lowering himself down by the old fir,which bent under his weight now.

Long ago Cathy retreated again,into the mist of that winter night,and present Catherine,as he had known she would,stirred too soon from Ellen's impotent elixir. Sitting straight up from her trance,she first looked at the clock above the mantle,and then her gaze caught his,and it seemed they were petrified,unable even to breathe.

How she had changed. Illness had left its arrant mark on her but could not diminish her. So it seemed if she was no longer herself,she was an ever more intriguing guess of herself. Where memory had lapsed it had also heightened. She was angular where she had been haughty,and tender where she had been fey,and her eyes bore shadows,reflecting on her bloodless cheeks,which gave them a penetrating softness.

It was himself who broke the spell;He did not recall how he conquered the terrible space separating them,but he found himself at last kneeling before her,her hands in his. Then he thought surely it was true,the shock had struck her insensible, for she would not respond but to stare mutely as if seized by a fit of ague.

What was he to do? He had failed and yet he had succeeded all at once. It was over and yet his perfect vision of damnation was tainted by this unforeseen display of grief. He kissed her hands,the only liberty he dared take and noted too the frailty there,the crush of small bones like a birds through transparent skin.

Contrite he quietly begged forgiveness from those still hands. He avowed not to disturb her again; he would leave her to her husband and to her peace,but should she seek him out he'd not be far and other such ineffectual decrees. With nothing to overtake the bastion of her silence,he raised himself and made to leave.

He made it to the door with some grace,but once in the yard he became a blind man charging recklessly ahead only to escape darkness. Theorizing a hundred outcomes he could not have fixed on this,this void ,where he spun now like an errant leaf. And she suffered somehow,.

His horse had at last made short work of its tether and removed itself to a fresh patch of grass quite a distance away. He was pondering dismally whether it was even worth the trouble of pursuing when he heard a shout issuing from the purgatory he'd just escaped. Stertorous as it may have been it was her fervent tone quickening the air. ''Heathcliff!''

She ran from beneath the shadow of the house,but it wouldn't do,she clung to the stile by the gate in a paroxysm;but he was already breaching the distance ere she take another step. They met in the middle of the yard, the catalyst of the flight sending them into each others arms with a gasp.

It seemed an eternity of silence,the sun climbing a step or two higher as they stood there,his cheek against hers. He felt hot tears against his face,and his neck and knew they were not hers exclusively.  
Speaking first she affirmed ''You won't go..you shall not''

''And what will you do with your husband then Catherine?'' He asked wondering really even in this unexpected bliss,what encounter she foresaw.

''Heathcliff are you mad?'' and she disentangled herself and stood back from him, searching his eyes as if she believed he was.'' Has Ellen told you nothing then? Has she been rambling on as usual saying nothing?..Heathcliff..

Taking his hands in hers she began walking, retreating ,drawing him toward the house again without taking her gaze away, as if she were afraid he would vanish.

Was it a hallucination,a trick of the pearlescent spring sunlight? She seemed to have changed,almost imperceptibly from the ethereal vision in the house. A rose hue infused her complexion spreading across her neck and her breast,and her eyes shone like onyx. But then the air was bracing and she'd been quite literally crushed in his arms for a quarter hour. Enough raise the blood of even the faintest constitution.

It took ages for her to draw her explanation. They sat side by side now on the sofa,but each to a corner as prudence dictated Although the delight he garnered from her profile,her head against her hand in pensive thought was beyond propriety. It seemed at long intervals,she drew her breath in sharply as if preparing to speak,but dismissed it in a sigh and an odd little smile she kept to herself.  
But at length she was animated again.

"Heathcliff,you may as well relax that indurate posture of yours,no one is coming tonight''

''And tomorrow?''

later of course,he would not believe anyone was as obtuse as himself just then.

''Not tomorrow,and not ever Heathcliff. Your delusions are quite flattering but if you must know, I am not Mrs Linton..yet. Far from it, I am not even Mistress of my own home here. Hindley lost everything and Edgar bought it back for us..he owns all of it...And Hindley is in Gimmerton asylum because of it.''

He was confounded, unable to readily except what he had just heard. It would have been easier to dismiss the whole thing as another dream. He might in days hear the story in full from her, but until then it was all he could do to keep his composure in the echo of her words;''I am not Mrs Linton'' How could fate so misrepresent the truth.

Asperity,bewilderment overtook him and he stood,moving some distance from her to a window, where he leaned with arms folded attempting to collect himself and his thoughts. but his comportment could not withstand it and in a moment he was up again.

"Tell me how it is Cathy,that in two years time you have still not adopted the onerous title of Mrs Linton? Is there by chance some unfortunate flaw in his character you overlooked ere you turned me out for his puny,slavering devotions? And perhaps you hold out hope it is only a provisional defect? But should I dare hazard such a conjecture? because the last I heard he alone comprised the air you breathed,the ground you walked on,and everything entirely. So there's a picture. Or is it something else something your cursed vanity would have you keep silent?"  
In earnest appeal,he approached her again . "what has happened here Cathy, tell me truthfully..and clear your mind and heart of any cynicism before you speak,for you must remember who you are speaking to.''

"The truth is I never promised to marry Edgar at all! It was he who asked me after..Oh I do not know even now! I let him believe it was my will and I knew I was wrong but I never answered him forthright. But he does not understand, he believes I am good but I am wicked Heathcliff, as Ellen says,a wicked child!. and so he comes again and again..For two and a half years I have suffered Heathcliff! Unable to leave yet unable to rest within these walls! And last week I was at peace because I had made up my mind finally to end this torment. and when he came again to leave with him as Mrs Linton. See how I am altered Heathcliff and don't doubt that I have lived and breathed perdition. You leave me without a word all these years,only to wonder if you are dead,or mortally wounded somewhere,and then you come here as you are and expect me to welcome you as if you were an absent neighbor. It won't do!" Her voice faltered,and a tear fell onto his hand; she drew hers away and turned quickly from him as if mortified by her own weakness.  
He hung his head,ashamed at his injudiciousness;now he could only see the passing years with respect to her feelings,his grief,as acute as it was disappeared into hers.

"You say it was a week ago,this resolution? Well,a week since I dreamt of you at the altar of yonder chapel. I called to you but you didn't't hear me,and I thought..well it seemed like a scene conjured by demons.What will you tell him Catherine,when he comes again?" he could not resist this bit of cavalier, fatuous as it was for it was his nature to be so intransigent even when moved by the most sober and poignant sentiments. Yet behind it there was uncertainty,for though he was willful never was he false or assuming and did not have the conceit to take her for granted.

Turning to face him again she clasped his hands,turning them over in hers,and over again so his palms rested on hers. She studied old scars there, absently mapping them with her fingers as if they held the key to her unspoken thoughts. "I shall tell him" She began with hesitation,then looking up into his eyes she found her voice; "I shall tell him that poor Catherine has died and been born as someone else"

"and won't he think you quite mad then?"

"I am mad. I am out of my mind with joy and sadness" She embellished her averment with an embrace.

Though woefully thin now, her bare arms about his neck were soft and cool, a fetter which left him defenseless. All life flowed unimpeded from her to himself and back without the constraints of bitterness and fear.

"Heathcliff,we are friends once more,at least are we not?"

"At least" He echoed absently,measuring the breadth and volume of his petitioner with undisguised delight.

"and being so would you not consider staying here,in your old home? It is your home while I am here. Heathcliff You cannot leave again,it is unthinkable."

In her generous estimation was a new confidence dangerously enchanting; but in the madness of this new reality,liberty was deceiving . Heaven and hell were impotent arguments confronted with her will,but arguments just the same. He would do anything,absolutely anything,and feel justified,even if he must fight his conscious later for that justification.

She leaned to him now like a child and they remained so for a long while,fast against each others hearts. Afraid to move lest it be yet another dream. ''Born as someone else'' she had said,and how true this rang within himself;and then remembering something else he asked ''Catherine,tell me why you are so sad?"

"Because, I have been reconciled with heaven,yet it is not enough. I have a strange notion that you are no longer akin to me. The world has changed you and left me here unmoved! How should I come to know you now? I feel we must stand back from one another,and yet I cannot let you go.''

''I will not go Cathy,unless you wish it.''

''Let us be fond observers then,and though you might be very confident of the outcome,ask nothing of me now.''

Before he could frame a reply, she showed her delightful perversity as the Catherine of old might have done; having him effectively in check,she then challenged his faith in her mandate by contradicting her own authority. If he proved himself weak she responded with harsher sanctions. The challenge was often no more than a word or two,as now a whisper delivered like a prayer to her hands folded quietly in her lap.''Yes,and yes"

He studied her face, reveling in its pale austerity,its transcendent shadows,and the possibilities one word could impart.''Fond indeed !" he sighed ''as you wish,but beware how you approach me,for if you recall Satan has consecrated me''

The morning wore on in into afternoon,and Ellen who had been busy with Hareton in the yard,soon remembered her less tractable charges,who,had fallen into a reverie in a corner of the sofa, insensate to the white sunbeams pouring across their faces.  
Ellen had hard work to shame either of them. When inquiring as to where the young man was to repair to that evening and when he would be starting off,she was answered with a brazen challenge to her authority; She,according to Catherine,was no more mistress of the house than herself now,and they would do as they pleased until the devil called them out. She then ordered her to fix the master chamber for her guest,and Ellen ,throwing down her apron said she mun do it herself if that was her opinion,but she'd do well to remember just whose house this was now.

They escaped any further recriminations by taking to the moor for the rest of the day. The clean air,and the distilled warmth of the April sun seeming to bring vigor and health and acumen back exponentially. Through the hours old arguments and grievances manifested like grim phantoms,only to blow away again in the high breeze,and in the lull, sweet concert they had not known since childhood blessed them.

As promised he refrained from any adjurations,though it maddened him not to speak so when all his heart told him he should. Catherine as well kept her oath and maintained in her exuberance and her joy a stoic distance,but from time to time forgetting would have him captured again; Here the thundering of his pulse within hers was enough to remind her.

In time she did her best explaining all of what transpired in his absence. Not six months after His disappearance,Hindley, with a lubricity far over reaching his talents began courting a girl from Gimmerton. It seemed he was truly smitten, for he managed to remain relatively sober for a few months before discovering she was not the woman she claimed,but eight years his junior. In a quandary he tried doing right by her and asking for her hand. But it seemed her chief interest lay in the material and when she discovered Hindley was not gentry,but merely a landed indigent,she spurned him.

Foolhardy to the last he refused to let it go. A new binge coincided with ever more reckless practices at the table. Believing he could win this damsel back with luck, little by little he had gambled away the house and its surrounding structures. She was not moved. In fact, to save her own reputation she'd gone to her parents with a story and they had immediately sought legal action. Unscrupulous fools,they simply wanted compensation for the supposed violations committed upon their child and the counsel appointed to look into it included none other than Edgar Linton Himself.

In the end,they were granted nothing,but Hindley was effectively ostracized, although he hadn't the sense any longer to know it or care. Borrowing even against his own remaining land he continued his race to damnation.

In the meantime the house had turned into a veritable bordello,with various individuals and their entourages claiming ownership and keeping the place in an uproar day and night.  
Catherine,who had barely recovered from the worst of her illness and had not been deemed out of danger by doctor Kenneth,suffered a relapse of sorts. Ellen,at her wits end at last and with no other options,made a desperate sojourn to Thrushcross Grange. There she poured out the tale to Mr Linton.

Within a weeks the house was restored to order. But it was a grim blessing. Edgar had bought out Hindley's creditors completely,and put down for the land as well,but he had left that in Catherine's name. Furthermore,in taking possession,he ordered Hindley to vacate. Hindley,along with Joseph relocated to a small cottage a mile from Wuthering Heights. No one knew how they got on,nor heard anything from them for close to three months. It seemed that things were quiet for a while,but it was only the hissing of a fuse hidden along the ground.

One night the residents of Thrushcross Grange awoke in alarm to a blaze in the east wing. Though it was promptly contained and no one was injured,the damage to that corner of the house was extensive. The culprit was not an agile one either and was overtaken not a quarter mile from the grounds. All were shocked to see a familiar figure emerge from the pursuant mob,flanked by sentries and footmen. It was Hindley. He was in such a state he could scarce articulate his own defense. But he swore he did nothing. Though the his blackened hands,and the flint found on his person refuted this.

With no one to speak for him or no one who would,he was declared mad,and now had been in asylum for nearly a year. Catherine had been once to see him and regretted it.He spoke of the past as if it were current and in such a vengeful,debauched frame of mind,she was embarrassed for both of them.

Somehow Heathcliff felt less than vindicated. Perhaps if he had heard it from someone else he would have rejoiced;But this was a burden on Catherine,a grief palpable in her voice and her eyes.Though he hated Hindley with black,bitter gall and had dreamed long of seeing his blood spilled, brilliant and hot as his own humiliation, his fury seemed strangely impotent now.

So they stayed out until the still of twilight was around them and though the air was warm, Heathcliff felt rain in it. Nether of them were prepared for a downpour,she,hatless in her low silk frock and him without his cloak. They had wandered miles from the house and it would certainly be dark before they got back and if it did rain they'd be drowned.

While considering this predicament, they found themselves at the top of the slope overlooking the marsh that lay between them and home. The haunted abyss where they might be still meeting and parting endlessly. If they overtook it,these ghosts would be vanquished.  
It was true,she was faster than him and could hardly be beat in a good race,and often she let him win, so for posterity,they were equal,but he was remembering the last. Unfair he had left her behind completely. The rules were broken.

He gave her a head start,but she was still quite beaten. She defended her title vigorously though and swore a rematch. He knew it was an uneven contest,because she had been so compromised. Even so,the exertion,rather than leaving her spent seemed to infuse her with vitality. Alas it was all for nothing.Ere they could pass the slough,the sky turned black and as they neared the west wall,the sky opened in a warm deluge,and they were soaked through before they entered the house.

Ellen said nothing,seeing them come in pooling water,looking like drowned rabbits. Neither did she move to help them. She was busy by the hearth with her charge,engrossing him in some fairytale so he did not notice wicked aunt Cathy,or her imposing companion. Despite her grudge,she had left a good deal of cheese bread and soup on a sideboard. Without giving a thought to her sorry state,or his Catherine took the food, and herself and Heathcliff into the kitchen.

They settled by the hearth hoping to dry out at least a little,but they were soaked,and the fire was small, unattended as Ellen was being stingy with the kindling and usually let it die out after supper. So they sat,cold and wet over their dinner. He hadn't much interest in the food ,though he had not seen even so much as bread in two days, for when his senses were heightened so as now, sitting across from her,it seemed he could not feel cold or hunger. She had procured a bottle of wine from somewhere Pushing it in front of him she asked."Heathcliff, what good will it do now to starve yourself with obstinance and melancholy?"

"It's not that" He smiled,surprised this once she should misread him. "'I've no complaints left,except one maybe. But you are right and we will dismiss it."

He did the best he could with the little repast,only because it pleased her,but found the wine much more accommodating,and reveled in the warmth it imparted,how like it was to soft bright sunlight in his blood.

Once more,though it was decidedly half hearted he made his case for going,only until morning,and again it fell on deaf ears. He did not seriously mean to leave and put the bottomless night between them;but they'd gone upstairs and as they stood in the corridor between their respective chambers,he was overcome with an intractable paroxysm of sentiment and nerves.

Striking the lamp in her hand she held it up against the darkness,but the light was frail so it was only herself illuminated against an obsidian scrim. Psyche with her beacon he thought;But Psyche was a human girl shivering in a damp silk dress and this did nothing to help his condition ''Ellen has not fixed the room,and there is no fire'' She peered into the obscure shambles of the chamber. By the lamp and the motes of starlight through the windows he saw the dim outlines of destruction; This had been Mr Earnshaw's room long ago. He'd not been in here since he was a child,but remembered well the queer opulence of it. The cavernous bed with its abundance of crimson drapery, the colossal furniture and ominous paintings looming in every corner,the tapestries and patterned rugs.

He watched her move about the room,righting things here and there, searching for the tapers overturned in their holders and lighting them as they were found so the room came to life in a dance of monstrous shadows.

Someone had been hard at work indeed. Broken furniture lay about the room in piles like fallen beasts.The curtains worked over by moths, clung to bent rods where they were not pulled to the floor and the face of the enormous grate and its its extravagant mantle were charred by a conflagration. Paintings lay against the walls in broken frames and in the corners,the remains of four mirrors which had once so spectacularly graced the walls reflected in woeful perspective the grand apocalypse.

She surveyed the devastation with growing dismay,dismay evolving into despair and he realized it was her first viewing of the calamity as well."Heathcliff,this is impossible,what shall we do?" She spoke so softly and less to him,because she had gone far into her self,and seemed lost there now. She sat her lamp down and knelt in front of something on the floor,another canvas twisted in its frame. Kneeling beside her he understood at once what held her so.

It was a simple composition,a rendering of fruits and foliage,namely white roses .It had been a wedding gift to the Earnshaws and remained Mr Earnshaw's favorite until his death. But Catherine did not share her fathers appreciation of the piece. In fact it was a chief source of fear and delightful ridicule. 'How dreary it is' she would point out..'what dingy sun hangs eternally in that sky?' And 'stand back Heathcliff and tell me what hand paints such freakish roses! Do you see it?' Standing back,he saw what she saw and from thenceforth could never see anything else; The innocent roses became a gaggle of twisted infantile visages craning forward on thin necks, mouths stretched in frozen grimaces and leaves like supplicating,yet somehow menacing hands waving over the hapless fruit scattered below. Depending on her caste of mind she would often have Ellen cover it up before she would be in the same room with it. If this bothered Mr Earnshaw,he kept silent on the matter,but he would not bear the two of them laughing at it.

Smiling wanly to herself she said "It seems conquered now,does it not Heathcliff? How I Feared it and made sport of it,and now it it is only pathetic"

"It was only ever that Cathy..not possessed as you believed"

She gingerly loosened it from the useless frame,and held it up for a moment in sober contemplation. "Strange,Heathcliff,he never Loved me at all you know,but he was so very fond of you." and with a stab of guilt he saw the truth in this,and he experienced a sudden cold bitterness toward his benefactor that he had never allowed himself before.

He saw now,the cold had got to her at last and she shivered terribly, reflecting his own nervelessness;but If he wrestled morality for his next decision,it was not a long fight. "Catherine,go now,change out of those wet things and come back to me. I've something to tell you and it won't wait until morning." She obeyed,but as she left he felt a strange emptiness encompassing him,as if this were a dream,and she had just vanished from it. And he swore then neither himself,or her should ever be so alone again.

He meant with all good intentions to tell her the truth,all that he had withheld so far. How would she respond knowing he was not merely well off enough to buy Wuthering Heights back if he chose,but but the entire north of England. And not only that but his money was steeped and the roots of his wealth spread,five hundred years strong across four continents. He meant to certainly; But how does one breech such an enormous chasm?Alas here he was though, without even a dry pair of clothes to change into. It seemed more than ridiculous and further,the thought terrified him.She had said so herself ; _I have a strange notion that you are no longer akin to me.  
_  
In the battered press he found an abundance of old clothes. Enough so he was decent and dry again when she came back.  
She was better now, and began with the argument again of where he should sleep,not here in this room God forbid,how improper. ''Hush Catherine,sit down here in front of me and listen'' She did so,and in the moment suspended they heard only the muffled sound of the clock downstairs striking twelve,and a solitary nightjar trilling in the alders.

He knelt in front of her quite overtaken ,his heart and his mind so contradicting one another, trying valiantly for words: but she cut him short, her eyes wide she held him fast to the floor.

''You promised! You promised me you would not do this!''

She slid from the chair to face him and he caught her seizing her as if to arrest the impetus of a plunge into damnation.

'' That was yesterdays promise..it has gone out like a flame with the strike of twelve,and besides,I have received dispensation'' ''Dispensation?'' She repeated incredulously,pray,from what source?''

There was a moment so very superlative, it appeared and went as an anomaly in the weave of time. A silence where each,stripped of all burdens stood revealed to the other,and so being were truly indistinguishable again.

''Cathy we'll go on as you wish indefinitely if it pleases you,I don't care,but for tonight,for my own sake and yours say you will marry me.'' He felt the movement of her hand,raised briefly to her cheek as she leaned against his shoulder.

''Stupid boy how should I answer you? You are not a proper lover. You cannot even bring yourself to utter the right words''

''And neither can you unless they are shouted at my back and thrown into the wind,yet I want you all the same.''

'' You heard me then? And kept running. Well we are both too thick to live and should be struck dead as we speak.''

''and would you regret it,to die here,as we are now?''

''I have no quarrel with anything or anyone now,even death.''

''So where is your obstacle then?''

''In front of me,but if he were to speak plainly he would be no obstacle at all.''

'' I can speak no plainer than I have! What will it be Catherine?''

'' Yes and yes then'' she repeated her prayer from the afternoon but kissed him instead. It was too much and he turned his head.

''Cathy don't lest we both be damned. but if you stay with me through the rest of the night. I swear on my life I won't touch you.''There was always an ominous thrill in the utterance of such formidable promises ,for what was their purpose in being bespoken if not to be dismantled?

''On your life? We should not ask so much of each other Heathcliff".

They lay together on the immense bed in the ruined chamber and held to their resolution. Although they could not say the night was completely without its perils, It was not the lovers trial it might have been for anyone else,because,from childhood the unspeakable delight they drew from each others company superseded every desire,both the material and the elusive.

Still, by sunrise,if nothing else they understood the limits of what a body could endure without dissolving and giving itself away to perdition wholly. Only once their own words seemed to conspire against them. Words spoken for the first time between them,with the muted starlight and the lamplight painting them in the hues of a dream.

They had only been playing,laughing over some foolish thing and suddenly they were very grave and sober, tangled in the softness of each others limbs, worn linen and lace and her hair like night across the pillow,

''Ellen says we are irredeemable''

''we've done nothing wrong'' he affirmed into its fragrant waves

''She says we are disgusting and dissolute''

"I died when I left you and every night away from you. What do I care for the opinions of others or their judgments? they are insipid_ my Beatrice._''

"What poetry is that Heathcliff?'' She asked so quietly he hardly heard her,laying her head on his arm and looking up at him.''It's been on your lips all day like a prayer.''

It was only a passage from _paradise,_which he'd read not long after he left,and was then and forever connected with her. '

He answered her_; "And here another of those splendors moved toward me; and by its brightening without, it showed its wish to please me.'Beatrice'._'' and he thought,if this was dissolution,piety was a causeless ideal.

After a lull,a break in the clouds which had let the heavens show through,the storm returned with a fury. Now the wind lashed the bare branches of the trees against the casements,and the lightening was so close it illuminated the room in violet light. In a volley of glass and splintered wood a branch crashed through the window, and a blast of wind breathed chaos into the room,snuffing out the candles and leaving them in blackness.  
The wind died away soon enough,but they lay silent for a long time, each wondering if it were a portent,or blessing. She spoke at last and her warm breath on his skin was anodyne.

"Heathcliff,I feel like a ghost''


	5. Reasons for waiting

Heathcliff stood at the summit of Pennistone crag studying the first shades of gathering darkness, how they fell like Spanish veils over the valley. The first stars were burning on the horizon brilliant against the violet blur of sky and earth, and the moon ascending through a bank of smoky clouds grew brighter with every appearance, as if trying to outdo them.

For the first time in ten days he stood apart from her. He was not glad of it, yet he could not help but appreciate the unexpected calm. Reprieve, or restorative, it didn't matter. He knew she must feel it too, for it had been days of hellish trials for both of them; the antagonist being their shared minds, and a pernicious reasoning which in its ingenuity, could excuse nearly any action.

He could fault her if he was inclined, knowing her delight laying waste to his defenses, but he knew this was hardly fair now. By default she had won her provinces, and even if the victory was pointless, he had no right to enter there and call her out. She was only living as she had learned, as any one would in a desolate territory, survival in its purist form cannot be questioned by conventionality. She was herself to the essence, for what good was pretense once it destroyed the host?

He was more likely to blame himself; though not because he was weak; They could survive a whole day blissful and oblivious of the world and it's trouble, for there was much to occupy their minds during the daylight hours; they had fixed their wedding for the end of may, and in the interim a thousand scenarios rose and fell before them. But no matter how fancy caught them, he was cautious, lest his true thoughts give him away in something too finely articulated. He'd made up his mind to let her believe until the day they were bound forever, that his wealth did not extend a hairbreadth beyond a fertile acre of land, and a few elegant pieces of cloth.

The weather was more than agreeable, as the sky had been bright and free of clouds, and the pastel sun breathed warmth that was hypnotic. They had been kind days, so soft and still, that listening, one could hear strains of music impressed on the environs. Errant notes gathered from a thousand distant places and playing sweetly, fading in and out of the air. So they stayed away from the house until the last light of evening; but the hour of dusk proved itself a most perilous emprise.

The end of their daily sojourns ever coincided with Ellen's retreat to her chamber; so finding the house entirely to themselves they would sit together for hours cheating her stingy fire into a blaze and chattering on as if they were children again.

Indeed it was this queer sleight of time which caught them so unaware. And standing on this stone peak that once been the battlement of a castle, his thoughts went far back for he could not help them, to the ruin of the kingdom.

How often, shivering in corners every winter, or locked in the garret straining their eyes over endless scripture while streams of tallow scorched their fingers, or hidden beneath the linen flounces of an obscure table, the pounding of Hindley's footsteps, passing and re passing Josephs as they sought them out, like the drum roll of an execution. How often then had they dreamed together, and whimsy soon failing them, swore an oath to have the house exclusively, if it meant expelling the autocracy in a coup.

Questioning one another on the fruition of said plans often led to the most profane, or sage conclusions whose particulars, once stowed in their minds, colored their thoughts forever.

''What will you do Heathcliff, when you are master of Wuthering heights?''

''I will commission a garden, like the gardens of Babylon we will live_ there_ in summer; then I will make windows of all the walls so in the winter we can see across the hills on all sides.'' What will you do Cathy, when you are queen of the countryside?'' He thought first she would wish for fires, great blazes in every hearth, looking into his own mind for concurrence. But were such longings a weakness even then? With her teeth chattering from the cold, from the icy draft of September curling in beneath the kitchen door, around their ankles and hands and every loose fold of clothing she answered

''I would carve _your _name above the door and whosoever did not pay obeisance would never pass, if there be twelve feet of snow around them''.

"Will you be a sentinel then, guarding the heights forever''

''I will. I will be the weather, I will be the snow and the wind.''

Asked again _he_ might have answered back something vile enough to wreck entirely the last idealistic scene; but he chose impiety over brutal veracity. Variations on the provisos of crapulence and procreation were always effective, and the baseness of it made even her suck her breath in, and forget the dream, pestering him on where he learned such revolting things. But he would not tell her what he saw every day; what he dreamed more often every night; the house in flames and the walls soaked with Hindley's blood.

Often that winter as he watched the first frosts, and then the snows transform the landscape, he thought of what she'd said, of _her_. Though she was ever in his mind and at his side, this notion gave her a separate new identity that he could somehow keep all to himself. She _was _the snow, all the myriad forms of it from the autumn ice that blackened the fields to the crystals melting in spring forming streams, and rivers and seas; And suddenly there was something tantalizing and sweet in small flakes caught and melting like tears down the glass where he pressed his hand; and the blaze he wished was damped, and the house could not burn, because she had put his name above the door.

This thought in turn, led him to the following autumn whose details he had nearly forgotten; the night Hindley came into their room like a foul tempest and flung him out into the darkness and the fight before he was at last turned out to the charity of the stables

He himself was not the instigator, and he did not bear the brunt of the punishment directly. It was Cathy. She had raised herself up to Hindley, who, though he could barely keep to his feet was a powerhouse of destruction and brute strength all the same. She interposed recklessly, madly between him and Heathcliff, and when this proved futile, she seized him and would not let go, despite Hindley's infuriated efforts to part them. So the determined wretch took out his whip, which he kept on him mostly now in anticipation of dealing with his unruly charges and he laid into Cathy. .

Still she would not let go. Half the blows were his as he could do nothing to save her but turn himself toward the offending weapon. The whip struck her neck at least twice and he felt the shocking warmth of her blood on his fingers. He thought he would have killed Hindley then, He felt not only the strength and the will growing within him, but the justness of it. If she had just released him, he would have done it and felt nothing.

But they were defeated. The tails bit into her back, his hands, her knees, his arms, every bit of flesh exposed, until she could no longer keep her hold on him. During the scuffle, Joseph had been summoned, but did not deign to make his appearance with any more haste than usual, so the hulking old ogre came like an untimely invocation into the end of an Armageddon. It wouldn't have taken the two of them to drag Heathcliff out, but Earnshaw owed his life to the miscreant whether he would know it or not.

So he was cast out, with the assurance that if he made the least effort to breach the master's authority, by any means, it would find its reinforcements again through Catherine.

All night he stayed beneath her window, at the base of the old fir, and all night he heard her cry until he thought she would suffocate on her own sobs. He had never heard her weep before and they were tears for which there was no comfort and no relief.

His flesh was a mass of welts, crisscrossing like the Arabic texts he'd seen in books, but he felt absolutely nothing. He thought of how he would dispatch Hindley. He knew the chemistry of death; aconite, witches glove, clematis and black hellebore. Plants and elements which could induce living death, innocent looking flowers with enough venom in one tiny seed to fell a man twice Hindley's size; but this was insignificant to him. He would use his own strength; nothing else could ever bring justification.

His hands were painted with her blood and it shone black in the moonlight. Why did she cry so, as if she'd been cast from heaven, and yet he could not shed one tear? It seemed there was nothing in the entire world existing between her presence above him, and the shadows on his palms, and yet every breath he drew in, the amalgamation of darkness, mouldering sod cold starlight, the scent of snow and the low, viscous winds of October distilled in him an ache bigger than the night itself.

For once he could not comfort her. It was not Hindley's mandate or threat, but that he knew, he felt as he always felt her miseries from the beginning, that she grieved not for herself, but for him. The enormity of this now lay between them as vast as the universe

He could hold her accountable for her betrayal until the end of time; but who, because his heart was sore with jealousy because his body and soul ached from space she'd left there, and from the bitterness which kept her from returning, ran into the night with wanton cruelty. Her words had torn him, stung him with poison, but they were only words.

He knew she was false, belying herself with every breath, and it was this sudden duplicity in her he could neither bear nor overcome. If he had shown himself how shamefaced she would have been, and she would have had no choice but to recant. But he did not; like a blackbird carrying it's portent of death he flew into the devouring darkness. So he was no more.

He often remembered that night in a fever dream. The lowering sky whose clouds rent themselves violently on the black curve of the heavens and the brilliant pulsing stars visible through the chaos seeming to sing, a strange electric humming; and of all things, climbing on the keening wind, the howling of wolves miles away. The lightening, hissing and crackling, netting the sky with argentate and cobalt; And in the sacrosanct hush between the winds and the roar of thunder her voice calling him, following him over the wasteland of night, first here, then there, but as sure as violent and plaintive as the pounding of his own pulse in his head. But to answer her, turn back would mean death, a fate worse than any which the elements could mete out.

Complacency, servitude, not love the way he felt it, the only way he understood it, fierce and dark and absolute, but a mockery of every dream he'd ever had. He would not be the sycophant, if it meant annihilating himself entirely.

Now, despite his luck, his survival and triumph, this desertion seemed absurd, for he did dream, too often that he turned back, obliterating that quavering poltroon forever from her mind like a cobweb. He did not believe for one instant her faith in any of the atrocious things she'd said, but she had believed them, if only briefly; shadow, or a flicker of light passing, the gravity of them just enough so she must confess, and not to himself as she always had, to free herself;

It happened that in all of their miseries, his vigils were exclusive. They were his alone. She would never know how he stayed beneath the window until sunrise, until exhaustion had silenced her; how he adored her from the darkness, the queen of angels cast down among the living, how he stood in the shadows listening until her words blighted him; but it wore at him, colored his dreams with strange things. That she would mourn him so, where he hadn't the whit to feel for himself, he hated it in fact, and so the night he fled from her into the hot summer rain, laying a curse across every path, every stone and ditch and hill they had tread together, he swore in the face of God she would never feel sorry for him again. She would hate him, damn him for leaving, for leaving her, rooted there. She could curse him until his name was lost to the four winds, but she could not pity him.


	6. Who are you

So It went late into evening; indisposed to commit themselves to the dour paradise upstairs,and the hours which would part them,even if only for a while, they took advantage of the empty parlor,and occupied their minds not with the pressing items which could beleaguer so during the day,but with old occupations and new.

Of the many useless and invaluable skills he'd acquired as a prerequisite to his high standing, the command of music was perhaps the most interesting. He'd little fascination with it for his life,save the strange chansons passed on from Ellen,and the spell they engendered when borrowed by certain people,singing unaware in the dark. Yet from the first instant it defied him,in the form of a dusty virginals, he found in himself a kinship with sound,if not the outright talent for it He could never remember a lullaby,or the sequence of scales ,yet it was there all the same when he placed his hands on the keys,as if were something well learned from another life.

He progressed quickly from keys to strings and was good enough,but as with everything,every thought and deed,this revelation soon became yet another progeny of his true desire. He found _her _in the notes,found he could create and manipulate her within the hollows of a keyboard or guitar;and the last became his boon,because of the requirement that it be held close to the heart while playing. So it was one of the only possessions he'd kept after throwing everything else to the wind,believing it was all well,for what use do dead men have for trifles.

So it had come round to this; This inanimate thing which had called her out so many nights and kept him from effectively losing his mind,was now drawn out of an evening as a distraction for nearly the very same purpose.

Cathy, amused at first that he should possess such an item, spent a good ten minutes studying it,propping it in the corner of the sofa as if it were a relic before asking ''What do you do with it?'' Taken aback at her charming ignorance,he was halfway into a detailed explanation before she interrupted with a gesture of sheer exasperation;

"I know what it _is _Heathcliff! I meant what do _you _do with it. It must be sentimental or a gift from someone. certainly you don't play it that's just too rich,to picture you so engaged..impossible!''

Now it was his turn to feel offended,and to suffer the ill effects of vainglory.

''It is..all those..but I'll have you know, I do play,and have since..''

He felt then he should say no more. He'd snatched the instrument up and sat with it defensively,communing briefly with it as if it were alive;But when he looked up ,she was watching him.

Whatever falsehoods came out of her mouth,they were swiftly disregarded in a glance,for her eyes could not lie. They belied her acrimony and conceit with a sounding lenity always tangible in the liquescent depths,just as sure as the glints of amber and ocher.

How improbable these same eyes could appear so cold when unaware or self absorbed; but they were not at the moment,they looked into him with such artless surprise he had to fumble for his next words.

Instead he absently began plucking out some well worn piece by Vivaldi, replacing the missing instruments as best he could with memory,watching his fingers so he did not have to look at her eyes.

''You really play it then?'' She mused touching the body of the instrument as if now she too imagined it were a living thing. ''But I do not like that tune..it's cold and melancholy ,as if it speaks only for itself.''.

"It can make any sound you will it to Catherine''

'' Then why do you make it cry so,Heathcliff? ''

She had pinned him once again,and he suddenly wanted her very close where she would share in his distraction,rather than having her at this distance,with every turn of his thoughts in full view.

''If you will be quiet and come here I will show you''

Then everything was completely wrong,yet it could not have been more perfect. Fate conspired against them with the utmost subtlety,yet her machinations were undeniable.

'' First of all you're holding wrong, it's not an ax.''

''Then show the right way,and tell me why you love it.''

"I love it because it can only be played-'' and he placed it thusly between them-''When held perfectly between the heart and the lap.''

"And who taught you to play,did you love them as well?"

''Indeed I did,but she ran off with a cello player.''

''A talented man I suppose? More skilled than you?

''A brute only.A brute with a Cello..he held it under his chin to play .''

She was a quick study,and within a half hour was able to draw out several tunes flawlessly,although she still did not understand the music and proffered for his endeavors ,an insistence on trite ballads But he was moment by moment less of a deft teacher,and her forte was not strings,but her singing;So oblivious to him she hummed ,until she found the words again to an old cradle song and the dulcet tones of her voice soon overwhelmed and somehow rendered enchanted the piquant responses of the guitar.

'All the world shall be of one religion  
All living things shall cease to die  
If ever I should prove false to my jewel  
Or any way my love deny  
Oh the world shall change  
And be most strange  
If from my mind your love remove  
For me heart is with him altogether  
Though I live not where I love'

In the weary lamplight he could just make out her profile, once a vision, so often departing at the break of day, he prayed for some cataclysmic event that might stop the sun from rising altogether.

Even now he dreaded the passing of these hours.Watching the fitful light play across her features;The high curve of her cheek,her smooth forehead kissed by little flames of color; he was recalled the old dream,where grief and longing permitted anything. Her arm moved against his as she played; words eluding her again she hummed through the absence,and smiled to herself.

"Now Heathcliff how am I? Was that right?''

'' Well you are at least holding it proper,that is certain''

''Really,is that all?''

She wore her hair looped back in a simple tie,and when he reached to loosen it she shrugged him off with agitation;but to splendid effect as the movement sent the freed tresses spilling over her shoulders. He was rapt with this dazzling feature,the thick coils garnering every spare flicker of light in the room,so they appeared alive and the warm scent of grass and nutmeg rising and lingering like a ghost of summer between them. He believed at once in the absurdity of convention,of subscribing wholly to various forms of torture,eschewing all hope of pleasure,given or received for a dim paradise peopled with other fools.

"Now look what you've done,how will I play now with this annoyance''

''If you are clever you will play to fit the annoyance.''

''Oh_ what_ Heathcliff? there is nothing for it.''

''Nothing ...Do you not remember _Captain Wedderburn?_''

The Laird o' Roslin's daughter  
Walked through the woods her lane  
And met with Captain Wedderburn, a servant of the King  
Says he unto his servant man, "Were it not against the law  
I'd take her to my own bed and lay her at the wall'"

"I'm walkin' here my lane," she says, "Among my father's trees  
An' you maun let me walk my lane, kind sir now, if you please  
The supper bell it will be rung an' I'll be missed away'  
So I'll not lie unto your bed at either stock or wall'"

He'd always thought the song absurd,and did not know why it should come to mind now,only that besieged by conflict his intellect would occasionally revert to puerile amusements still; He Pictured for a moment _they _were those two fools in the woods kneeling in God's house not out of reverence but from the weight guilt; But the notion of of being mutually disgraced,the absolute improbability that they should be waylaid by guilt for anything they shared, made him laugh out loud;

She'd been playing on,ignoring his advances skillfully,preferring the novelty of her new found talent with minimal distraction,when she halted at once with a painfully discordant twang,the last chord plucked so hard its drawn out echo hummed like a swarm of bees.

She arose at once,abandoning the guitar and himself and taking to a window across the room. He felt disoriented for a moment. She had not severed from him,yet she would not be near him and he felt dismal,monstrous.

It occurred to him that she had more reason to mistrust him than he did her .Dwelling in his own grief for so long,he had almost forgotten what he grieved for. She had become a graven idol,a thing worshiped from a bitter distance. He berated this icon,blamed it,cried at its feet and cursed it even as he revered it,but never once until tonight did he see the enormous failing of his beliefs, his overwhelming complacency in their dreadful parting.

Who had sworn him to this place,was it Catherine or was it himself believing they had both been born from the great rocks overshadowing the valley.''We are part of this just as the sky touching it,or the guelder rose and spurge clinging to it or the grouse who builds its nest in the heather,and should we dare depart we would be no more,but just spend ourselves across the open air like smoke." This was his thought,and she had given voice to it and consecrated it.

How did he measure the success of this now? There was no satisfaction in it. He had left her where she could not find him,or reach him. and her infractions were meaningless compared to this. There were times,if he were unguarded,forgetful of his aim,or too sanguine,he heard often in his sleep a voice,so singular he was sure it must be hers,plangent but clear,but he dared not bend his ear to it for the tones changed imperceptibly,something sonorous,thick with misery,tears,some agony only hell could invent. No sleight or grief he had ever known in his life came close to the stertorous plea''_Do not leave me in this abyss where I cannot find you '' _

So it was clear just what he must seem to her,worse than a stranger;a complete fool coming back all tenderness and finery .It was she alone who had dwelt in the land of the dead for two years unable to move, not one light or word of hope until three days ago. They _were_ separate,parted forever,though each still akin to the other as in childhood,and now he was at a loss how overcome the distance.

He approached where she stood at the window,very still with her face turned toward the outer darkness. She did not look up until she felt him near,until his reflection met hers.

''It was only at my own foolishness,but I did not mean to laugh Catherine,if it offended you.''

''and what was this imprudence Heathcliff?'' She asked his image in the glass,

''That we should malefactors in our own lives for anything we might do. No one has cared for us heretofore,who will be there to condemn us now?''

'Truants'' she addressed their reflection.

''I have been truant Catherine,only me. It is my burden!'' His arms were about her,his cheek resting against hers,and he thought again of Dante and Beatrice,how he had fallen in love with her in his ninth year and spent his life watching for her in the streets of Florence,his life but for a glimpse here and there,until little by little,she dwindled from the mortal world arising as an angel at the door of heaven. Amazing how she flew with him through the spheres but would not be with him in paradise.

She was pensive, focused on him,the mirror of her eyes looking into the mirror of his ''If that is so,as you say Heathcliff,then why have you remained so silent over it? For three days you've been in my company,every minute from dawn to dusk,and have not spoken once about how you came to be[and she hesitated,as if there were some aspersion she were ready to apply and thought better of it how you came to be..as you are. For you are the same,yet someone or something has painted strange colors on you.''

''I have traveled through hell only Catherine,what details would you wish from that?''

"I think your fortitude belies you . Someone has looked kindly on you,enough so you might come back here and baffle me with the divergence;but you are are a feast of contradictions as always,and I only wish to know how you counseled yourself in my absence. What suasive arguments at last landed you back here? And do not attempt to divert me again with your charms and entreaties,for a mistrust of silence is born within me and I would just as soon die alone than lay with a stranger for the rest of my life.''

He knew he could not lie to her,but neither could he concede . They stood,each on the opposing rocks of a jagged chasm,a rift torn in the earth by lightning and should he speak recklessly the devastation would be complete.. He could never think of that night,of the moment when he could no longer hear her voice behind him,without experiencing an atrocious sinking of his entire being. And he equated this with an unalterable finality,an unforgivable violation.;And he tended to forget with reckless alacrity that redemption was not a given.

Yet looking at their shared reflection in the glass, floating opaline as starlight on the surface of a lake,he could never believe even in the worst moments of diffidence and grief, that they should hold asunder.

They were, what they were meant then and always to be. How else could they coalesce so seamlessly within its depths?his Jetty locks flowing,with an imperceptible shift in hue,into the bright sable of hers,and their eyes,sharing the same darkness,two souls ever gazing out from the verge of twilight,thin as sapling pines both of them,but straight and strong as ash. This rare constitution shared by those born bent against the wind,a constant resistance not conquering,but fortifying.

As if in accordance with this the changeable April skies sent a fine shower over the moors. It came and went in a breath,but the drops lingered on the glass and caught them in a watercolor blur,running down the panes ere long,a thousand facets of color and light,blue and rust and black and gold commingling.

''Catherine if you bear with me,but for a little while everything will come to you,in time. You say you cannot abide with silence,but if you recall I was never given to self expression,so do not put it between us now.;but if you will be close to me,away from this room a little while longer I can at least give you a brief picture of what you wish,''

''And should I trust you? How do I know you haven't been somewhere practicing the black arts just to affix us all with some terrible spell,to turn us all to beetles and salamanders?"The cloud had passed,and she smiled now,the faintest ghost curving the corners of her mouth.

''So you have found me out,but don't applaud yourself yet for I've something else in mind for you. It is too easy to crawl about blind and senseless in the earth..oh,but to be aware Catherine,Like a tree rooted in the earth,always reaching for the sky..'' He took her hands in his and retreated toward the stairs but he kept his back to the shadows waiting above,for her humor was too rare now.

''Ineffectual,coming there Heathcliff. The legerdemain is ignorant of its own target!..You'd do better to bewilder me with endless sermons on the sin of being idle.''

''Shall I? Are you so deserving-Your wan countenance and airy Constitution speak for it I think''.

She halted their ascent halfway up,where the last light from a parlor window gave way to the upper darkness, She spoke and her voice was too soft,like an echo from the shores of a remote island ''Heathcliff Am I really so changed?'' raising her hands,she touched her face and then,as if it answered for a looking glass,his own tracing the geography of bone and flesh;nose and mouth,the plain of cheek and forehead,with her fingers.

''Only a little pale-'' He could barely form the words,as if articulating from the paralysis of a dream '' it will pass-'' He captured her hands,and hesitant to draw them away,kissed them as they were,fingertips still one with his own skin,now palms and delicate articulations,rose white,gold tinged and azure veined.

Designed by that touch he came to life within it; a figure whose composure belied the feral intelligence lurking in the eyes,whose stalwart, agile if somewhat reedy frame kept at odds with a refined exterior. He saw himself as a singular anomaly,a boorish,fell creation disguised with an ill fitted elegance;yet all this,defined,brought fourth beneath the wondering softness of her cool hands seemed not disagreeable,only compelling,and rather than being judged felt itself the recipient of an unconditional clemency.

Astonishing,the intimacy in this exchange, no embrace or kiss they had yet shared, nor the nights they had spent intertwined in the watches of the great room had stirred him so. He closed his eyes against the brush of her thumb.. Promises vows consummation, a lifetime could pass in this moment,all in the stillness between dark and light,the lower and the upper world,and yet somehow it must remain tangible,for the corporeal as well as the spiritual demanded it. She was trapped within his hands,as sure as he was trapped within the spell of her touch.

Her fingers still crushed in his he kissed her,with no piety save for an old worship,and a deep contrition over it's deficiencies.

Just as her gentle solicitation was averment to the _nuova vita _ so then was the returning endearment, Though in truth,it sadly lacked the grace of experience, but as they leaned each into the other,caught in the ebb of twilight ,He saw with all certainty the rightness of things,and the truth.

Within her was a garden,a sky an ocean he hardly knew ,though ruling there by favor once; He had dwelt there only as a chill cloud in a bright sky,and now the possibility of it stretched before him again. and but for the colors,the light and dark of this landscape no one owned the

A draft crept down from the upper hallway as if a window at the end of the corridor had swung open, and the tendrils of cold closed around his heart ,Dante's words came to him.again; _'For nearing its desired end, our intellect sinks into an abyss so deep that memory fails to follow it'._

The dream and the fever were dissipating in the churlish grip of winter. This tremor passed through Catherine as well for her soul inclined to his thrummed like wings beating wildly and out of time,and house fed off it's own echoes,once full of fear,now becoming fear itself

"what ails you Catherine?'' He held back for an instant to study her. Even in the stingy light he could see how the color rose in her face and yet beneath it she was pale as death.

''I think I imagined just as we stood.._we_ were estranged to the whole world..even one another..foolish I suppose.''

"Yes,very foolish,considering,don't you think?'' And he tried put forth his most sanguine tone,though this very thing had prevailed on him through the evening,and the pale specter beneath the flush of desire bespoke a despair and a lingering malaise. Flowers crushed underfoot ''But should we stand here all night we would certainly prove ourselves impractical,if not deranged;Listen,the clock is striking nine already,and it was only dusk a moment ago when we stopped here''

"It is a mournful sound in this quite house. It seems a mockery of all the joys that have departed..empty hours passing for their own amusement!''

"Joys so easily dissipated are only worth mockery Cathy.''

Glancing up into the hallway as they ascended the stairs,he felt a strange elation,something of terror fortitude and reverence all at once. Above,the Chill oppressive chamber waited like a sacristy; they could make confession there but little else,yet so quarantined it never occurred to them that they were sanctioned at all. Alas though, how arbitrary spirits were; even tonight they had exhibited their capriciousness hour by hour in the changing moods of their hosts;so he knew it was with perilous uncertainty they continued this innocent cohabitation.

It was not unprecedented,they had shared the same spaces since infancy,limbs and breath and dreams indistinguishable as those of birds wintered in a hollow tree,but she was no longer_ Cathy_ ,she was love,darling and in a matter of weeks,wife.Though he had not garnered the impudence to pronounce such things outright, and if he said them aloud to himself and had cause to examine them before they dissipated into thin air,they made him laugh so, that anyone observing might have been convinced he was insane, they were nonetheless what moved him. To announce these things to himself,to find himself accidentally musing over them where he had been brooding gloomily over some past sin,was enlightening,but it was also transportive,and he knew better than Catherine, that not subjugated exclusively by each others will but something so absurdly disreputable as phantoms,transgression was paramount.


	7. Ghosts

They sat together in the center of the great bed, only one candle lit for modesty's sake; it was the only obeisance they made to propriety at all .But the the deliberation of it amused him,for it was in truth nothing but the most gratifying subterfuge they could think up. What darkness would not condone,it would at least forgive.

''What are you doing now Heathcliff..you've annoyed me long enough with your riddles and games,and now you will have me blinded in the bargain?'' She sat before him,her hands instinctively stretching out into the gloom as he placed his hands over her eyes.

"I promised ,not long since that I would answer for where I have been,and I will keep my oath to the best of my ability,if you will be patient only for a while. Be quiet and close your eyes.''

"Very well,I will try,but it is very hard with that little flame on the table dancing in the corner of my vision. I can't make it go away no matter how I turn my head It even seeps through your fingers!''

''Then sit back in my shadow,here,and be still beneath my hands''. so obliging,she leaned against him,her head touching his shoulder.

"Now what do you see Cathy,Is the light gone?''

''It is. I see nothing but darkness''

"Breathe in then,until your lungs ache,take in everything entirely with one inhalation,the room and all around us,then tell me what you see.'' She did so,and it seemed she became so light with the effort they might both float away.

''What then,tell me.''

''There are shapes rising from the dark..the blackness is taking form''

''Breathe easy now and tell me what happens''

''I smell the earth,as if the casement were wide open and a breeze is bringing the moor into the room completely..the heather,the green leaves of trees,even the roots,The marsh. Even the orchards near the grange,but all heady,as it is only moments before a storm..

''And what of the dark?''

"It is only night,as it is now. I can see the shapes of clouds moving against it. Variations of gray and black,and dark blue. Rain clouds..but they are passing so fast..and now I see the landscape..it is only the moors,but it too is rushing beneath me and away. I feel as if I want to take flight,but there are no currents to lift me. The air is very heavy and still,almost suffocating."

"And now''

Lightning,everywhere, streaks crossing the sky like veins of silver. Strange,I might be just outside this room for all I see is but the storm passing overhead just now,yet I know it is some other world,and the lightning is like a net falling on me..I can feel the sting of it burning my skin,and it sears through me like an arrow..Heathcliff! take your hands away..I can't see at all and the darkness is wicked!

''Hush Cathy. Look up. Is it still black?''

"No. The sky is all around me,clear and full of stars,but it is the morning sky,for they are all faded,and it's very cold but the air is light and smells like brine''

"Look down now at your feet,what is there?''

''Earth..not dirt though,dark gray,almost black and wet. It sticks to my skin. In my hand it is rough and sparkles like glass..and..and it tastes of salt!''

"Is that all?''

''No..there is water rushing in at my feet,all foam and bits of plants and pebbles,and it rushes out and it feels as if the entire earth is being pulled out from beneath me. I feel as if I am falling,then it comes back..and again,and then again;and the sound!a great roar,all around.''

''Listen..be sharp Cathy..What do you really hear around you?''

"The sound is like the din of storm,but there is no lull,only a momentary ebb and in it I can hear birds and bells and drums all crashing into one another as if tossed into a spiraling gale,and they come and they go,sometimes far sometimes right over me''

''Now look straight before you''

"Water! Nothing but water,It is the great green sea coming toward me. Its endless. One step and I will be swallowed in it''

"Step forward then Catherine,or turn back and run up the shore if you are afraid..but you will be alone there''

"I'm not afraid''

''Is the water not like ice on your skin? As cold as death?'

"Cold,yes..but not like death,though I think it could stop my heart. It is alive,I can feel all the live things in it,and they are aware of me too.''

''You are shivering Cathy,are you positive it is not death?''

'' I've gone numb..I see my hair floating about me on the waves like Sargasso. The water tastes like tears''

"Breathe Catherine..as if it is your last''

He had reached a stage of euphoria not so much pleasant as vital,for she now stood at the threshold of death with him without knowing,without knowing the exactness of it.''

"Heathcliff!''

"Breathe in again like you did at the first. The sky,the sun the clouds entirely,and then tell me what you see.''

''The water, its gone,not gone but far below me,beneath a cradle of wood. No not a cradle..its a ship. The planks are damp beneath my feet and the sails waving above me..towering block out the sun. I see it's monstrous shadow slipping across the surface of the ocean,and all about me is so silent. Everything is bright and fresh,but I don't feel it.''

"What do you mean Cathy,what _do_ you feel?''

''I see people,faces passing close by by me, and I feel despair. Worse than that I feel death now,I do. When I was in the water I knew I was in peril but it seemed sweet compared to this. Ah my heart is frozen,yet it feels the devastation from a great injury..Oh God, this is impossible where have you taken me Heathcliff? I feel so sick with hopelessness.''

''Where are you going Cathy?''

''I am looking over the side of the ship. That sea of faces makes me dizzier than the sea itself. How amazing; the water so is calm and reflecting everything ,as smooth as glass.''

''Open your eyes'' he took his hands away quickly and dropped back against the cushions,watching her intently as she came back around to the surrounding present. ''It is enough now. It's late at night and we have too far to go.''

'' You have left me in darkness again,but it is just this room,and look how the tiny candle flame turns the shadows into gargantuan monsters crawling up and down the walls.''

He felt shaken somehow, dissipated.,again being on the ship which had carried them apart and standing once more trapped in his own despair,within _her_, forgetting how well she knew him, it was careless.

''So you have crossed the ocean Heathcliff? It is compelling but it tells me nothing. Except..''

''Except?''

"Except that it is the sea which carried you away from England''

''And?''

"and from me''

"Such a grim catalyst! Do think it means to tell its own tale and be done then? Come here now and let me smooth those lines from your forehead Melpomene,and tomorrow night we shall see what else it has to say.''

She did not lay next to him,folding herself into the hollow of his arm as usual,but lay across him,with her head against his heart and her arms stretched over him as if some threat hovered above . momentarily she was up again,propped on her elbow and studying him just as he had taken her in before. Her face did soften beneath the brush of his hand,A riot of lily and rose in the last blurring throes of light; but her gaze remained troubled,the sparks of the candle dancing in her eyes reflecting a deep disquiet.

"I must explain myself I suppose with a little more discretion. I'm afraid I have made you think it is an accumulation of worldly things which alienate us from each other,because have commented so recklessly these past days on your various..refinements; but all those are of little consequence to me.''

''Then tell me as quickly as your tact will allow,where is the transgression? I will answer for it with murder''

''Don't joke,or I will leave you here''

He saw she was in earnest and instinctively reached out to hold her there. He did not presently want to imagine where the night would end if he were to find himself wandering through the black halls looking for her,coming upon her white ghost in the obscurity of an unguarded room.

'' That is only fair'' He answered softly. ''But let's forget it,the night is over soon enough anyway''

"I shan't forget it'' she answered equally,but laying her head down once more seemed resigned,and remained quiet there for a long while. He would have been content,at least then to lie in the silence entangled completely in her,his hand wandering absently from the thin fabric of her gown to the warmth of her hair,released from the dread of trespass beneath the sentinels watch. His body against hers was as still as the room itself for reverence beset him as surely as desire.

A person would feel so, prone before the saints in an empty chapel,so stirred in the mind and soul that the body is all but benumbed. This is how they had passed three nights so far,but he could feel the discord of her thoughts like the presage of a storm,and there would be no peace.

''Heathcliff,when we stood on the stairs hours ago your heart was beating like an iron fist against mine''

''It's not so impervious,and who is to blame?''

''I touched your face..it was nothing but a kiss,and now we lay here and that same heart is as quiet as sleep. It only murmurs like a little rill, moved by nothing,stirring nothing..but mine is..it feels still as if it will shatter me. How can I believe you are the same Heathcliff who left here when you appear then stow yourself away so quickly like something that changes its colors in the sun?''

She seized his hands and crushed them against her breast and doubtless that heart might best her,for it throbbed so violently against his palm,ringing through him like the reverberation of a bell,he felt as if he might be consumed in the sound. He wondered at how he had not noticed before,deafened by his own pulse.

she raised herself to her knees and looked down on him,he found in every move a _new_ paradox; The worn cloth of her dress brushing like clouds against his skin,an errant vapor of Clary and verbena,and she a latent vitality within;her features reduced to shadows in the last retreat of light,fey as if kissed by the delinquents of eternity;the yellow flames dancing in her eyes a moment before now a molten illumination whose steady beacon thrilled and unnerved him and the curve of her mouth a sly angle between joy and grief,yet neither if it must tell.

Caught by the spell of her above him he was recalled to his angels in the cemetery long ago, bound by vines,plaintive yet impassive gazing never to the sky but outward, forever fixed on the line dividing earth and the heavens; guarding mutely through the ages a world of secrets abhorrent as they were provoking. They were all that stood between the mystery of God and a paradise existing surely he thought,somewhere on the earth beneath his feet.

There were times,and would be times in the days to come where he wished he was as he had been then,his pockets empty his clothes dirty, his face as dark as the bruises defining his flesh,

looking up at her he saw a flicker of pain distort her features,and then depart. He understood it at once. That she should think he did not want her,at anytime was unspeakable. Could she really believe such a thing?

''What then would you ask of me Cathy?''

''Speak your heart and not your head!''

''I cannot be anymore to you than I already am..what do you mean?"

"I feel as if I am alone,even while you are beside me.''

"Oh is the night not contrary..how do I explain it to you..only to say,don't believe for an instant your own thoughts,they are more treacherous than you know''

She was silent for a minute,but not still, smoothing the hair from his forehead.

''I wish to see you.. to know if it is my Heathcliff who has come back or a changeling..

''I am at a loss then how to conjure myself.''

She leaned over him again,her hair a dark veil falling between them and the eyes of the room,and kissed him. She was learning too well from one who had learned everything he knew in dreams,and his thoughts if they were thoughts at all turned from present burdens,from angels and endless empty seas,to the primitive again;for a moment he was as he wished entirely.

''What then,If it is only one of my changeling tricks to discredit you

''such are the perils of trespass.''

''Trespass..'' Her singular expression thrilled him and he did not know why.He said the word again to himself just to feel it cross his spine like electricity.

''But to answer you Heathcliff or changeling,I would appease myself with the counterfeit for it would vex me far less than to think my-to think _you_ had become impassable as stone, for I know what will not be moved soon becomes cruel and harsh.''

''Impassable as stone? _You _are harsh! but I will prove you wrong in one and completely discount the other.''

''Look here at this picture of chaos; the same starless eyes,the same cloudy brow and sullen expression,perhaps it is you- but I am not afraid of you. '' She held him captive again for but a moment,searching with her gaze for some sure sign of her old paramour and drawing the new one out with deft fingers.

. Once existing in her he could not help but to be awed by a dizzying scape of astral seasons- horizons whirling amidst mercurial radiance and the obsidian hush of extinction,for thus was _she_ this treacherous and vital landscape where he could scarce keep his balance. He longed for this now,this complete harmony in disorder which was herself.And presently understood the grief _he_ presented,in being so changed,for she baffled him equally with her sufferance and he wished now,though perhaps not with adequate fervency,that she was not so charitable or obliging,but impervious as before.

Yet he had versed himself too well in the art of the stoic and now his entire being cried out against its own contradictions. The ache in his flesh where it met hers,was not even an honest one,not the near immolation whenever they had cause to be so close during the day,but a terrible undefined pressure,as if he were deep under water being pulled asunder by the currants.

''What now?'' She asked,and appeared resigned to his seeming apathy.

'' Don't go ''

''Heathcliff,you are unmovable,tell me why I should not or I will go now and not return until May.''

He meant to say something,anything at all but the faculty had deserted him

''Very well then,I will say goodnight''

She kissed him and disengaging herself from his grasp,attempted her escape,but he held on to her hand in stubborn silence

''You are being very childish'' She snatched her hand away and crossed the room too quickly,riling his senses like a startle of doves; A flurry of auburn and ivory displacing the gloom and then dissolving with the hollow report of footsteps.


	8. My love I picture this

It seemed forever to him,waiting as he did every night for the slow sea of darkness to fill in the space she'd left and drowned him in restless sleep;narrow that it was it may as well have been the span of a cosmos, from one end to the other.

Deposed with no avocation to follow such departing brilliance-and the earliest men must have felt this way witnessing the sun vanish in an eclipse- he was left to gaze into the ebony vault above,and doing this night after night he became the subject of a passion play; a host of scenes evolving from the murk and unfolding with painful exactitude. He watched himself running from her ,all the times he had run from her,his face twisted into an ugly mask and his body like a black ship,cursed,forever set against opposing currents.

At last overcome with the suffocating oppression of the room and the prospects of languishing all night without her in the eyed gloom, he soon found himself in the hallway abreast of the devouring obscurity. He was never sure how he came to be there; it was orchestrated as transitions often are in dreams,a move or a goal accomplished without it's sequential parts.

Her door was ajar;so he caught her, a soft and fitful illumination framed within the somber interstice. she was brushing her hair, coercing the unruly waves into plaits. A long long time since, _this_ had escaped him,the wonder of observing her at this ordinary and intimate task.

Here again was exquisite separation. The impassable distance wherein she was present to him entirely,sovereign and inviolable in command of her own world _without_ him. So condemning the banishment from her into his own autonomy,his affinity redoubled with the forfeiture and again until it filled and overreached the gap. And so it grew from devotion to fascination from passion to craving to madness. Always it seemed exclusive,until now. Her,entreaties,her requisitions affirmed her complacency,and her suffering,that distance was only illusion and she had withstood the onslaught just as well. What began the first night they were parted now came to its conclusion,and in himself all elements were gathered,and distance vanquished in the affiliation of of heart and soul and body.

Still his _mind_ was an agitation of thoughts he could not command,though he tried for he knew how she'd hear them,and each slight movement from her as they stood in their mutual isolation stirred a new revelation,a riot of impossible colors in his head.

_Trespass.. _She had opened a thousand doors with the word,imparted as if it were an endearment,and now it would not leave him. The very shape of it across his lips bespoke a duality, of their parallel nature being a contradiction in itself.

_Trespass shall define us then as obedience guides the rest. What use have we for such a heaven as theirs which strips us of our identities and leaves us blind to all but a dispassionate deity? An army of angels and God in all his fury will not part us again,or sanction us let the church burn down around us and the sky crash down on our heads...Ah but then,but then will you not soon find yourself discontent,a fugitive from grace,exiled in evening forever regretting that your soul cleaved to mine..Truant then..the word was spoken and holds its place just as the other..Truant as when we parted before._

Insanity..Who's thought were these? He heard his own voice, but hers as well, a recitative like the litany of vows spoken into the darkness.

He saw her smile when he came in,turning her face away from the revealing light of her candle,as if the smile were a conspiracy between her and the darkness. He shut the door behind him,and unable to move forward or turn away simply reclined against it,as was his habit of old,arms folded in an unconsciously defensive posture.

Soberly she approached him,the taper raised in her hand so all he saw were her great dark eyes in an aureate haze. She came so close he felt the scorch of the little flame,and then without ceremony she extinguished it in a breath and threw it to the floor.

She was in his arms again,so wholly he felt her pulse singing through him as his own,and within this remote and ghostless sphere,the impetus of desire was fierce and sounding. Though he felt no contrition whatsoever save for a poignant disappointment that it should pass in this indifference of place and time,the verity was overwhelming; that love ultimately must be an equation of pain. But then what did he know? Naive to a disadvantage, his only intelligence of these things came from books,and the cryptic palaver of dowagers and chambermaids.

''Cathy I have no right''

"Is that why you are here now, to impress me with your stoicism again?'' She pushed herself free of him and stood just out of arms reach,incredulous.

''are you in earnest?-''he laughed, though his arms,his entire body raged against the emptiness. Impossible that she could be apart from him now.

''you had no right to leave, to be silent to forget.''

''I've not _forgotten a_nything Cathy''

Disregarding this, she turned away from him and sat on the edge of the bed,looking about as if she were in a bleak museum.

He felt that as well, the quiescence of a tomb, The grey hush of dust confounding details,and the moonlight through the obscured window,a tarnished vapor distorting shadows into accusatory shapes.

_She _was the only thing alive here, and he _was _but himself, the tempest he'd tried to outrun even while bent against the power of its destruction, the skies fractured in the shout of thunder,and the earth washed away in a deluge. The totality left him dazed.

He came to her, and sitting beside her thought for the first time that she was pretty, more that her dispassionate features actually possessed an astonishing beauty, and he had seen enough of it to know. He longed for her then,unbound and unguarded,but not daring enough to allow his unversed hands such liberty consoled himself with absently unwinding the severe braids,until her hair hung loose in its shining waves again. He flinched a little at _her _boldness, at her warm hands all at once on the bare skin beneath his shirt,only for the scars there he did not want her to know,or to see; regardless, the hesitation went by and she took him in with an inhalation so deep and sudden it seemed a dark presage of pain,for it stilled his own breath.

Vastly underestimating the somatic gains of the last five years,they landed,somewhat graceless and not without compromise of extremity within the confines of the little bed. She moved in the effort to organize herself within the penury of space and the soft crush of her beneath him,the exactness of her form with his was absolute.

There was nothing forward in her concession,it simply was as everything with them an instinctive progression of one following the other;But they were ultimately,to his belief,the finest aspirants to ruin ever. Bafflements of ties and buttons were examined then passed over in favor of the perpetual balm of ignorance, for within the awkwardness existed the holy and beautiful. He could imagine staying exactly this way forever,assimilated by the means and heedless to the end.

Regardless, here approached a finality he could scarce comprehend even now. He felt the softness of her bare leg against his side,the diffuse warmth making them indistinguishable from one another,and a dark undertow impelling ,and so to the fearsome cadence moving them forward into _this_unknown.

''Are you afraid of me now Cathy?'' He felt ashamed and elated at once

''How odd you are..I would not know who to fear -Your soul is like iron but the rest of you is a conflagration,I'm either incinerated or shut out,ah but there is yet one place. Your wicked mind seems too silent in all this.''

''My wicked mind thinks only of one thing,as it always has''

"I have caught you in a lie already,for I know two things you dote on,and would as soon give up one as the other''

''Cathy don't, it is unbearable. If you knew what suffering was at all you would not ask.''

''I do,I have and it is why must know''

''Then consider this the first of my confessions and be done with it for tonight' He kissed her,_imbibed _her again,but there was no more striving,for though the impedances were daunting any small acquiescence they gave was all the more cherished for that

They lay there for a moment,breathless,shoulder to shoulder; Time slowed in its mad rush to reach fate,to alter and there was a peculiar sweetness in the inertia,as if their own schemes were inconsequential,any effort to move destiny for better or worse was pointless for they were in the hands of omnipotence.

The next instant passed by in a delirium,a cusp of purplish light from the window fell across her features her eyes half closed and her lips moved as if in prayer he could not hear. Her pale fingers lay across the stays of her gown,the ribbon tangled there in the act of being pulled away

For no reason at all,something came back to him,he had heard once_the sleep of reason brings forth monsters'. _An artist,an old man somewhere in Spain. It was only passing whisper in his head,but she'd heard it clearly

Abruptly,so fast it scarce registered before he could stop her,she was up and moving away from him andacross the room. She did not take her eyes from him,and strangely this seemed to hold him where he was.

''Wake up Heathcliff!'' There was a queer resonance to this both cheerful and urgent, out of place even for this scene. as soon as she reached the door she turned on her heels her and was outside in the hall. She slammed it behind her and he heard the lock slide shut. Not yet fully back to his senses he ran to the door,trying it though he knew it was barred.

She was still on the other side. Though it was dead he could feel her there and despite her laughter ,the echo tripping his last nerve,he felt only trepidation and remorse in the silence. How quickly passion turned to fury as if they were really the same entity, one only weary of itself deciding to masquerade as the other. He shook the door, threatened and cajoled her as only he knew how and she only responded with equal incitement.

''Ah there's a goaded beast. Is that Heathcliff at last? I think it must be,hear how he rattles the bars of his cage! I would let him free,but I cannot..I can't say why,it is only for me to know.''

''I will make you repent this Cathy''

''Bravo,my hero..there is nothing you can take from me that I would not give you willingly. Make me sorry then if you can.''

''Open the door then!''

''After we are married ,but I can't think where the reverend will stand on my side or yours''

''He may stand headfirst in a ditch with his bible in his-''

''Goodnight Heathcliff''

He threw out every oath he'd ever known but the door was impervious to any rage visited on it,then remembering they were not alone held his breath against them. He was cold and suddenly wracked with unendurable sickness. It twisted him until he at last crashed his head again and again on the wall to escape it.

He heard her footsteps retreat far down the hall. She was gone for some twenty minutes and returned to his door very quietly. If he had not been listening he never would have heard at all,so silent she was,a ghost in those halls at midnight.

She threw something beneath the door and was gone again,into the other room which he now greatly regretted leaving at all.

He ignored the thing as long as he could,but at last picking it up saw it was an envelope yellow and blotched with time. It was addressed with his name only and a date in early autumn of seventeen eighty one. Not three years ago and how the envelope crumbled in his hand,as if it were brittle from being held over a fire.

Unfolding the pages inside,not half so friable he was confronted with a familiar scrawl. Curious how dear even this was,the stormy consonants inclining or leaping too high and the undecided vowels broken and boastful,stirring in him the same delight as if he beheld her form beside him. But he wanted to throttle that form presently and the endless jumble of words racing across the page taunted him. Hard to believe these senseless forms were the first script he had ever learned to read. Epithets and codes scribbled on the margin of a bible or a primer.

But something beyond those lay within this he knew,simply by the absence of certain ink blots obscuring words,where the pen had paused for thought. He knew this from his own volume of letters to her,only one ever sent,and where had it gone?

_My darling...darling darling pain_

_I believe with all my soul,or whatever serves as my soul now that you can hear me._

_Three months since and no word. I am torn and scattered over the moors in a million pieces_

_and each piece asking every shock of heather,every tree and pebble,bird and cloud and stream _

_Have you seen him? tell me where. Whither did he go? is he at the bottom of the marsh (as My evil _

_brother with a smile on his face he thinks I do not see, swears,.) I ask I plead laying my head next_

_to the black water, if he is here let his ghost speak for it now and he will not soon lie there _

_alone; but the world is dumb and greedy with its secrets. _

_I know I loved it once when it was ours,but now the earth has turned into a mighty stranger_

_and I am only a wanderer there,a truant and I hate it. May it be annihilated in a catastrophe and _

_send me elsewhere, if there be an elsewhere. I don't believe though. I don't believe. Let me be _

_destroyed too._

_In June there were rumors of wolves. They came from the direction of Sugden,and the swamp _

_there and some of our neighbors to the west were bemoaning the loss of several heads of sheep. _

_I did not believe it. Perhaps they wandered off or were stolen by thieves; I did not until I _

_I heard them myself._

_In the throes of that dreadful illness I sat at my casement,for in Ellen's absence I would have it _

_wide open. She means to suffocate me to death,keeping me in here,but I know the air from the _

_mountain is a restorative._

_I first imagined it was only the wind keening through rocks. You know, It can make such a _

_mournful racket,and disguise its voice as anything,and I am not well and have thought sometimes _

_It was you calling at the window..but the sound was very plaintive and did not follow the haphazard _

_Pattern of the wind. It was a call, a speaking voice and each time it entreated the night another such _

_clarion responded from an opposing direction, until the two joined and then after sometime were _

_Silent._

_I listened to this chorus every night for a week. It was so distant, only the sharpest ear and one _

_Listening with their entire self could have heard it. I had hoped they would stay far out, for I had _

_Begun to feel an affinity with them, the two lone creatures persecuted because of one or two sheep-_

_the stupidest animal on Gods green earth._

_Perhaps they knew the men were already out with their muskets and despair had beset them. _

_I don't know Heathcliff, Anymore than I know if you are alive, why they did not turn about and _

_make_ _for other hunting grounds, but as the nights wore away into July then August, I could hear _

_them coming closer._

_I told the boy who tends the sheep to have his stupid charges in Earlier. But it was too late. We lost one of the lambs, if you remember,the very small one born late in spring._

_The boy was afraid and told Joseph ,otherwise it might have gone unnoticed. And Joseph told _

_Hindley and he and some men from the village went out with guns._

_Oh Heathcliff,I hope If I die I forget this before I do! _

_They'd shot him, it was quite true and stood about laughing and boasting,very proud of themselves. I Ran out and saw him only from a distance,with his executioners all around him,a magnificent silver _

_brown beast,at least three feet wide from shoulder to shoulder even as he lay there. _

_But as if this was not enough of an offense,they cut off his head and deigned to fashion it into _

_some sort of gruesome trophy._

_They impaled it on a post and set it out far on the edge of our property._

_For a month Heathcliff, I heard her calling after him. The sound was so mournful it broke my _

_heart,which cannot stand any more breaking. I felt my own loss in her cry. _

_I have taken to night walking. It is the only time I find any peace and I find you in the darkness._

_Only a week ago I was just wandering, irked with the sudden revelation that that there was not _

_one new sight on these moors or mountains and the familiar ones only grieved me._

_I pondered just how far I would have to walk to lose myself. I wondered if i could walk until _

_winter and let the snows cover me. I had got to the edge of the moor where that pathetic,flyblown _

_memento hung gazing up the empty sky and I stopped in my tracks, for_

_resting on the ground beneath it, a stranger to repose as myself, was another wolf. I guessed_

_she must be a female by her small size,the other voice I 'd heard answering the one now stilled. I am_

_no coward I swear Heathcliff and perhaps it was just my battered mind, too swayed by all the stories_

_making the rounds of the village and the farms, but I was frozen in absolute terror._

_We,she and I remained unmoving,and staring at each other for what felt like an eternity. And suddenly_

_I was no longer afraid,but sad,as I had been hearing them calling to one another in the distance._

_I was not even afraid when at last she raised herself and came towards me. But she only walked_

_past,turned,and went out towards the swamp. She looked back to me once before she disappeared into_

_the dark ,and I will forever believe somehow we are the same._

_For two weeks I heard her crying out beyond the woods to the west,and then ever more mournful_

_and distant until I could hear her no more. I don't know if she left,or she was shot,the better for her if_

_it was the latter._

_I dream sometimes,when you are elusive or I cannot dream of you without feeling death close by_

_me,wishing for it,that we are thus as those two far out in the wild;but we are not apart calling_

_hopelessly to each other,we are somewhere far away where no one will hunt us,or hurt us._

_I wish,I wish with a fervency that devastates me, that even if you do not want me I could know_

_where you were. I have visions,strange scenes that visit me without provocation,I know they must be_

_from you,what you are seeing and you must be alive,but if you were why would you leave me here so long in this way._

_They say I am damaged,with a malady of the brain that does not heal. Who cares..I know what that illness is. My soul. I cannot live without my soul._

_You would laugh at me to hear it I know. It is weak foolish,the palaver of the damned..but I love you I_

_love you so that I am annihilated in it,I am part of the earth and the stars and yet they mean naught ..it is all one yet it is nothing my love._


	9. Morning

In the morning she to came to him airily as if nothing had transpired. She had a tray of tea and a book and though she was a model of blithe composure she let the latter escape to the floor with a thump and set the former down so haphazard most of it spilled. If he could not read her so well he might have thought her irredeemable. He did not stir when she addressed him with this avalanche,but recalled to the night's drubbing by the specter of duplicity before him, only fixed on her gloomily. '' Don't glare so Heathcliff '' she continued on lightly "I'm sure you have slept better in our old room than I have alone in that one across the hall. I don't think I kept my eyes closed for more than a minute.'' It was true she'd not slept at all. Her face being a shade paler and her eyes burning as if from fever.

Retrieving the book and forgetting the tea,she sat on the edge of the bed,and he moved away from her feeling contrary as a three year old,and never to be outdone in this she moved and sat against him.

"Give over Heathcliff,it's not as bad as that''

She leaned to kiss him and he turned away.''Bah!I shall never touch you again as long as we live''

"Then may we die tomorrow my sweet fool '' ''A remedy Catherine Quickly. I have not lived as a fool I will not die as one.''

''It is a prerequisite to being married,is it not. It is the law''

''Then I rescind my offer.''

"You can't now, it would certainly be a fatal transgression. It is too late.''

With abrupt diffidence he was aware of his immodest condition;He lay shirtless and uncovered and while he did not have the whit to let it trouble him in the gloom of night, imposter that he was,the late morning sun crawling across him now offered no such respite. He felt like a fugitive from the light only wishing to dive back into the darkness. Her eyes rested on him or rather lingered and he could feel himself outlined acutely in that gaze. Remembering something he took himself away from it at once. If the sudden movement raised her suspicions it was not apparent at least.

''Well then,here is a remedy"

She held the book open on her knee,and he could see it was the _Commedia._

"Do you remember when we would sit here every night just so,and I taught you from my books after Hindley had taken yours away?''

''I recall: and what did it get us?"

''Don't be bitter now it is diminishing. Teach me this,as I once showed you your lessons. I long to read it but the language is foreign. I know you know it because I have heard you speak phrases from it.''

He took the book from her,marveling again at the strange poem in which he had found her again in his darkest hour.

''It is Italian..no stranger than Latin if you have learned it well. Do you remember any of those? The curate had a an ash stick and for every passage incorrect he left a welts across our ears.''

''Yes,and on a very bad day we went about with a constant ringing in our heads,and very much annoyed each other by saying what? What? ''

Sitting beside her he pointed to the first passage.

''Can you guess what this says?''

"I cannot even begin to try,unless I know what is about.''

"It is about a man journeying through hell''

''Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita.mi ritrovai per una selva oscura ... 'of our lives ..a dark wood-''

''halfway through our life's journey, I found myself in a forest of shadows, for I had lost the path that is straight.''

''Ah that is a terrible thing to anticipate.''


	10. Mytholme

So it had gone following seven days. As long as the weather was favorable,they stayed out,and left the house to Ellen and Hareton,and in the evening distracted themselves with the _Commedia_ and the guitar,and the depth of the distraction became obvious in her growing skills with both language and music;and their mutual surfeit at this endless preoccupation was apparent as well in the newly acquired delight of world slang,but in the absence of deserving targets they had only each other.

But the fall of night inevitably hosted the same tableau. Waylaying her as she turned to depart,to go up alone first to the inhospitable room and prepare for bed, He could make a liar and a fool of himself for hours,all while remaining a model of temperance.

She no longer grieved him over his stubborn reticence, though she had become so adept at undermining it he wondered if he had gained any advantage at all, for ultimately it was only coincidence that had shaped things thus far; had one element been altered he may have been in the earth now, or faraway with her in some place without winter.

The house was more oppressive than even it had been before he left, simply because he knew what lay beyond it it was an even more inclusive prison than it had been under Hindley's tyranny, for nothing could be worse than the high handedness with which he dealt with his own destiny.

In all this he at last began to feel disordered, as one waking from a dream to find the known world foreign and nameless. He had not even asked why he allowed himself to linger here and not insisted directly they both depart to some healthier part of the world. Encountering her so altered,where he only anticipated his _own _death, touched by a devastation that would forever leave its mark, set him off entirely. Where she had once grounded him, she was now like a peregrine flower only blooming in darkness. A thing which would not suffer the scrutiny of exposure, lest it fade beneath a careless hand.

His mind and heart had resigned him little by little to still he was headstrong enough, or perhaps just foolish enough not to be sotted completely by the ambiguous comforts of a static life.

Too often in lapses of logic he referred to Wuthering heights as his home, because it had become indistinguishable from what he truly loved. This was well while he knew nothing of the world but for books, but now he saw it for what it was; a crumbling prison, and as any house absorbs and archives the echoes of the lives within, the horrors it once concealed from the bright world were ever present in the hopeless decay creeping across the walls. It presented a dark stain on an otherwise brilliant horizon It was no wonder to him they had chosen to live outdoors whenever possible, [or sometimes hardly possible], from the beginning.

Today, the first breath of the moor had taken his ideas far from Wuthering Heights. He was loath to part from her even for an hour, but she insisted that she had plenty of company in Hareton and Ellen. Inspired by her own newly acquired skills, she was going attempt to teach Hareton to read, for though he knew his letters, he seemed in danger of becoming dumb with nothing but Ellen's Fairytale's filling his head. Spontaneous ,though not entirely hopeless that she might accompany him, it did not weigh on him immediately that she appeared unusually nervous and out of sorts when seeing him off. But he ruminated on it throughout the day,and forming a cohesive pattern out of the mornings little pictures saw something there decidedly though not terribly wrong.

She balked, and then quite skittishly excused herself completely from the trip. He started to protest, but seeing she was on the verge of becoming querulous, left it alone. But she would start and sigh whenever he touched her, and chewing her nails until her fingers were raw, glance furtively about the room as if the very walls were holding her for trial. But he had been versed in excess by Ellen in the perils of vexing her at all, for the dreadful illness had lain waste to her nerves as well.

He only credited half of her tales and put the others aside as coyly self serving. He knew, stout and sensible as she might appear no one dreaded, or was more grievously put out by Catherine's temper than Ellen. Since they were children she had too often ended up on the corporeal end of it; but unlike Himself, she had not acquired the right to retaliate equally, although he was sure she had experimented more than once or twice.

He had gone to Gimmerton and inquired of a Realtor there into a certain property at the edge of the woods near Mytholme. He could not even be sure it stood as he remembered it, a great tall stone house hidden in the burnished green shadows of an oak grove. Long before the imposing bastion of Thrushcross grange thrust itself between them, this structure had existed for them ,a secret quickening in the imagination.

When they were hardly past infancy, perhaps no more than seven and eight, able enough to resent and rebuke Hindley's evolving persecution,they invented a game of sorts; a strategy designed to keep themselves far, and away out of his wrath. daring one to go so far out from the other, only out of hearing range and the wanderer must be found by following clues. And each time they went further;The one who gave in at last lost his provinces entirely and live in subservience to the winner until the game was played again.

Through the months this took them farther and farther from home,expanding their kingdom to a twelve mile radius,which was a remarkable distance considering never took their horses on these sojourns.

The game went on for years until they were familiar with every footpath; from home,to the barren coal fields, to the patches of forest and the rivers. In time was not so much a game any more, as a constant surveillance.

It was at the end of summer, a fortnight before Hindley was at last sent off to school, when they found the house. At the mill in Mytholme they had stopped to swim in the stream, and fallen asleep drying themselves out in the sun. When he awoke Cathy had vanished again. A half hour passed before he at last found her in the lane,or rather,near it,hiding behind a stand of broom which had yet a few yellow flowers clinging to it. She was watching something in the distance and hardly noticed him as he approached.

Her quarry was a woman, bent picking harebells in a field opposite. She was tall, and her long dark hair hung loose about her shoulders, tossed and braided by the wind. Her dress was nearly the same pale violet hue as the flowers. Her whole appearance was one of careless ease, yet her face was stricken, no one had ever worn the hearts grief so plainly. There was something very odd about her as well. She seemed to flow in and of focus with the shifting cloud light, as if she were only part of it .

Cathy was enthralled,and he could not pull her away. They began to follow her as she moved across the field, and eventually drifted up the lane. If she noticed their shadows behind her she never let on. As she walked she sang a song very like the chansons Ellen sang, but much older, and so achingly sad it made him feel ashamed to listen.

At last she led them to the house, and still singing, disappeared into the dark interior. Even after the woman and her voice had vanished Cathy could not let it go.

It was in all ,a more beautiful abode than Wuthering heights,though in composition not so different. Their house slouched on its hill, glowering in dark stone, it's cold suspicious gaze staring over the house, with multi hued stones of soft brown and fawn and yellow and gray, stood upright and honest in its glade of sheltering trees, its large square casements giving it an open,welcoming expression.

It lay a little to the west, much lower than Wuthering Heights, and was sheltered from the weather by trees which grew straight and tall as theirs grew stunted and twisted. This peculiar situation endowed it with a fascination.

So they returned again the following day and over and ever after, finding themselves there at least twice in the week.

The woman had a husband and at least three small children. He was there the second time they came,and Cathy marveled how the woman could seem so abysmally sad with such a nice family surrounding her. But Heathcliff noted that, rather than just being sad she did not seem to like them at all. Rather than being with them, she chose to stand at the window, observing them wistfully as they played or worked in the yard. And it was always so. She was either walking up the road or standing in the window.

Then one week the husband was absent. The children played in the yard alone. A week, then two passed and he did not re-appear.

In the weeks that followed the children left as well. First the oldest, a girl of about six, then two boys,no more than three and four.

It was so queer to see that last child playing alone in the yard. He seemed too small to be out so long unattended , yet his mother would only stare from the window. Cathy, unable to help herself, called out to him once, but he did not respond. Then one day _he_ was gone as she remained, gazing out into the empty distance.

Not long after, they followed her up the lane one more time. It was toward evening when the failing light often plays tricks on the eye. There was a rise and a turn in the road where in pursuing her, they would temporarily lose sight of her before she came back into view on the other side; but this time,when they cleared it,she was no where to be seen, though the view was open all the way down to the woods.

Arriving at the house they discovered she was not there either, at least not at her usual station by the window. Emboldened by familiarity,they crept closer to the house than they had ever dared, until they were looking into the casements.

There was nothing beyond their own reflections but empty darkness. Not a single candle burned, and no fires were lit. Heathcliff did not like it, and he told her so. The longer they stayed less and less was he at ease. As they peered from window to window, he was sure the world behind them,reflected in the glass,did not look right. Shapes flitted just out of sight behind trees, and the brilliant swatch of sky above them was a host of shifting phantoms, which only took their shape just outside the eye. He insisted they leave and for once she didn't protest.

For a time, with the new found peace at Wuthering Heights, they forgot about the house and the family. Hindley was gone and to be able to play at home was an irresistible novelty.

Not six months passed when, riding one day on an errand they found themselves near the lane where they had first seen the dark haired woman; but it was mid February and the fields were still covered in snow. They knew she nor anyone else would not be out wandering aimlessly

There were no evergreens around the house, so approaching it they were greeted by a forest of towering skeletons, and the soft grasses dried to a blackened pelt. The silence about was so oppressive it made his blood run cold. No winter birds sang. The wind was silent and there were otherwise no signs of human habitation.

The door of the house hung open ,unguarded and unbarred. Vines had crawled up along the threshold and across the frames, the same pea vines which had graced the house front, now dried brown sinews clawing at the jamb.

How she convinced him to do it he could not remember; but from then, and for months and months after they possessed the house as if it were their own.

It was a ruin inside, as if no had lived there in a hundred years; But if the woman had moved in haste, following her family wherever they had gone, it would not take long for the elements to do their work. On the moors, even in the sheltered hollows, each season has it's torments.

Still, the longer they visited, more evident it became that the desertion had not been thorough or abrupt. Evidence of the former occupants remained in every room, reduced by the decay of years not months.

Catherine became so entranced with the house, it seemed like a spell besetting her. She swept the hearth and had him gather peat and light fires in the grates. Salvaging bits of this and that, a dish with a lovely pattern,a wooden toy, a bit of tapestry or a copper pot, she made it a home.

She was in love with house, with the way the snowy world looked from its large windows,and the music the naked branches made against each other anytime an errant gale stole into the glade. To him it was just a house, a place full of gloom and cobwebs which they were trespassing in at great risk, when they could be comfortable at home. Yet if she cared as much for it he could not help doing the same.

So they continued their habitation until the following winter, when Mr Earnshaw became ill. Though she was contrary to withstand the abuses of a peevish old man, seeing how _he_ was bound to the her fathers side, she could not very well be remiss in her duty as a daughter .

Thusly, the house left their thoughts. Never did they even ride toward Mytholme any more. When they did take up these excursions again the following year, their direction had change so drastically, she would surely be hard pressed to remember the fond hours they spent there.

The solicitor in Gimmerton was no help at all. He groused at any mention of properties lying to the west, as if it were a hostile foreign country. "You'll have to talk to someone that way I don't know any house In Mytholme."

He spent the better part of the day doing just that, with no success, until at last,directed to spring head, he found who he had been looking for.

It was not a Realtor, but a man so old he hardly counted anymore, and Heathcliff left in doubt that he had been led aright.

According to the dissipated codger, the house had belonged to a an Oswyn Twarbee, some seventy years before. He came from London and never did make his home here. The house was bought for his son after he was disgraced by some unfortunate union, to keep him well out of the way; but the house was not occupied long, before he simply disappeared. Whether he died or ran off was never known.

The house was left to a caretaker, the old mans great grandfather. He refused to either live in it,or relinquish possession of it. Subsequently, each of his eligible descendants kept the same oath. So the house stood empty for as long, except for occasional maintenance,which even he himself had not attempted in some ten years.

For a long while the conversation, turning sometimes down a meandering alley, led Heathcliff to think perhaps this decrepit squire might follow the example of his superstitious ancestors, and send him on his way; but even an eye thick as glue could respond to an excess of collateral, thrown before it.

The house was his,and he considered it the first worthy acquisition of a new she would say about it was another matter.

If it had been in sad need of repair only eight years before, it was now in a most forlorn state of decay. The roof was open to the sky, and glass was gone from the windows. Inside, the surrounding woods had made a home. The queer corner fireplaces rattled and fluttered with a menagerie; birds, mice and weasels,and the winds walking freely through the upper rooms argued in a chorus of mournful sonorities.

If she ever believed there were ghosts here it did not perplex her. How many evenings had she stood in the kirk yard and challenged them, envious perhaps, but not afraid. The sad revenants of an old house, forming themselves from the malingering shadows would not move her in the least.

He sat for a long while in the parlor, in an hour living out a dozen fates in his head. Their own children running in the yard, their own voices floating through the evening air, and every window warm with light. Or perhaps this would only be a whim, a seclusion where the first acts of marriage were played out. Or nothing at all. There was no way to calculate how far she had grown beyond this dream. Perhaps he would find in her the spirit he remembered, and they would not even spend a night here.

In truth,he hoped for the latter. Whether it had always been that way within him,or because,having a ridiculous measure of worldliness put upon him, he could no longer fit himself into the simplicity of such a scene, he did not know, He only knew that he could not,with any satisfactory outcome, form a picture of domestic bliss and fit himself and her into it.

He'd kept her letter through the week, in his coat pocket close to his heart. It was a way of keeping her,as she had been, and in some way himself, close by.

Sitting in the ruined parlor,somnolent in time with its own _memento mori,_ he read again her desperate address. The last shout and retreating sigh of the child, the girl he loved so that he could never find a word for love.

Where had he been when she, at last unable to stand the clamor of these thoughts, penned them just to escape them? He'd been on a ship crossing the Atlantic, leaning over the gunwales, listening with his soul to the boiling sea rushing away beneath him, calling him back to the depths and the silence.

He arrived home just as the last light was fading. The moon was brilliant and full and threw the heights into eerie relief. He found Cathy kneeling with Hareton in the bare garden planting onions and turnips. The boy was digging holes with a spoon more intent on farming the grubs and worms he found there,and eating the dirt than anything his aunt was doing.

She smiled when she saw him,her sweetness undisguised in a moment of surprise,then as quickly put away. ''He's a fine one isn't he Heathcliff, a regular aesthete! He refused to eat his soup, so I thought if he learned the labor,he might learn to love the result; and look at him. Next time I will give him his bowl and send him outside and save myself the trouble.''

He knelt down beside Hareton, '' dirt has its advantages, if one can get used to the taste..You might tell Aunt Cathy her labor is lost anyway, she's planted a month too late, happily for you.'' delighted at this sudden confidence, the child offered him a fistful of beetles. He took them and released them while Hareton watched in perplexity as they scrambled back into the earth.

''They do not want to be free Hareton. Their life is beneath, with the earth piled upon them. Without the weight of it to work against,and tunnels to dig, they are lost.''

Really the child did not comprehend the words, but he had taken to Heathcliff. He looked up at him curiously, a swath of dirt painting a crooked smile across his cheeks, Heathcliff was taken again by his resemblance to Catherine, even more evident as he lost the chubbiness of infancy and began to grow spare.

Ellen called from the house, and he generously foisted the spoon into Heathcliff's fingers and ran off preferring always an evening of solipsism and fairtytales at her side than the company of these two queer figures.

''Why do you tell him such things Heathcliff,it is only confusing,and useless''

''Give him credit he is wiser than you think''

''Hmm..Show me that and I will show you turnips blooming in the snow!''

''did you pull him by the ear to come out here, in the dark and cold?''

''No, he came willingly when I said we could dig up the garden. He is always very happy to be out here''

''and not always hiding in the house behind Ellen's skirts,where he could be easily enough, pampered and spoiled.''

''You invest a huge admiration in such a small commodity''

''He reminds me of someone,of something..someone passed and something yet to be.''

''Well,no wonder. Certain then it is not my brother or he'd not be so lucky. Do you think he remembers that you once saved his life?''

''I hope not'' He felt grim at that,bested by her again remembering his sentiments the night Hareton had landed in his arms from the upper railing,squalling his last.

"And lets neither of us ever tell him''


	11. Shadows on shadows

He did not tell her about the house; it was the least of his deceptions,but he'd no intention of keeping _that _a secret until they were married. In fact, he'd hoped it would be a distraction from the other.

That day she'd come into particularly high spirits, and the was mood enduring. She was more at ease even than in the carefree days of Hindley's absence years before. She did not bait or chide him any longer, and for once they stayed up very late for the joy of it, taking up the old occupation of night walking; going out as far as Pennistone crag and climbing to the top, both of them as sure footed as when they were twelve. There they would trace the vagaries of the moon, pointing out by its mercurial light the old landmarks of a forgotten kingdom, stretching out forever across the resplendent spring landscape.

Despite the reprieve, the somewhat disgraceful events of the week past inspired a quiet unease. Certainly it was owing in great measure to the liberties they had heretofore taken with each other; innocent as they were they were not without controversy, and of late Ellen had deemed to make of herself a meddler, thereby sharpening with her odd and primitive suspicions a peculiar awareness in each of them, so they began to suffer a growing self consciousness. Even so, they refused to be put out; never contrite over their trespasses, protocol was a bit of twaddle to be scoffed at. Its function lay not within the yet unassembled pieces of the future, but in the unaccountable beginning of their own lives.

From these first shadows cast he devised a novel reasoning, and little by little action followed the same path. Often discerning even in the most guileless hours something horribly wrong, he wondered if impiety were not growing with him like the roots of a baleful vine; his own perversity coming round to strangle him. He woke too often in the cold arms of the night, and subject to such perfidy underwent a cycle of terrible revelations; first that he had come to at some dire point in his history, as someone who has fallen asleep at a play, and finds on opening his eyes he has become the antagonist in his rude sphere, and powerless move against the encroaching hostilities of justice must yield to annihilation.

The second was an old theme returning to make sport of his unguarded conscious. A notion, once a dim but constant companion coming now to prey on him, all the more formidable for a brief absence. It was this; from the time he parted from her, he did not exist as others exist, guided by self awareness, all was lost to her. Often in the darkness he would start up with a nameless dread, as if self and soul had come back to weigh on him a thousand fold, and it was not that _he_ who'd been exiled, but Cathy; extinguished in the storm which had carried him away. If _he_ was in hell _she_ was a wanderer nowhere, neither there nor heaven or earth. Reprieved now by proof of her living presence, this horror was well dismissed so long as she would lay with him through the night, as when they were children; but in the wake of a shameful blunder she was less and less inclined to such liberty, and he in turn was less apt to take issue with it, lest transgression be repeated on a grander scale.

So it came to pass, that waking to her absence in the most plaintive watches of night, a graver loss was suffered. In that stretch of oblivion where the moonstruck compass spins, he'd assumed the aspect of a monarch, such whose might and wealth are only manifest in his closest subjects. These souls were the very mortar holding the stones of a kingdom together, and it was these who left him altogether in a great catastrophe. He knew they must represent in their varied forms only the myriad aspects and possibilities of _one, _for the capacity to love indiscriminately was beyond himself; and so this chasm was not the temporary absence of Catherine but the erasure of of an entire lifetime lived.

The last of these was a species of the same persecution, though to his favor a mere dream which he could shake off , even if it came back twice as vivid for the effort. He dreamt of a family; how they were his own he knew not, for he was exiled from their company as if he were a hated shade which _they_ dreamed and wished with all importunity to dispel. Faceless and mute they remained, however he tried to stir them into speech, though at times he was sure of their voices mingling low and urgent in a room just out of sight, which he could never reach. Yet it was the terrible pall between which bespoke best the dismal sentiments these phantasms cherished toward him. Then these deep and unmovable silences were no quiet at all, but the long, low sonorities of the damned, those condemned by solitude. The din, echoing the most abject and tuneless lament of pity, was so effective in its torment that he did start up from it too often in terror and disgust, and make himself a fugitive from sleep thereafter.

He'd never, even in the most desolate hours of his existence known such merciless isolation. Though loathe to discover his exact connection to this small populace lest it prove a premonition, alas, racked to his limit once, and unable to shake himself free of it he gathered all the powers of his being and attempted to seize disclosure. He received for his challenge an appalling response, fixing forever his belief that he was but a peon to his own dreams. His kin, whoever they were, turned at once toward him and in each accusing face he saw only Cathy, a maddening amalgamation of her dear features in a strangers visage. Her warm eyes cold as stones at the bottom of a well, her mouth set in an unmoving frown of disapproval, hatred or grief. The shades of her skin still tingling under his living fingertips repeated over and over in remote unyielding forms. A likeness dissembled in shattered glass lowered back at him, until he felt upon waking at last as if he'd lived a hundred years beneath it.

Often from this particular dream he roused with a determination to seek out Catherine, if only to dispel the bitterness of the nightmare. While still in that lawless region of Nyx he could not think better of it, and before he was aware of his present surroundings, would find himself in the hallway, against her door shut resolutely against the blackness. Waking there he could not help but admit a bit of pathos for himself. A dismal amusement, and if he laughed at it the sound was swallowed as quickly by the thickness of dust and dark.

How unseemly he must look lingering there, with no more than a desire to see her living face, each turn of expression reassuring if not agreeable: her start on seeing him, a quickening of rose, a smile tempered too quickly by whatever thoughts it concealed. Her manner of averting her gaze if he spoke too directly, but seeking _his _should he be silent too long, and in that petition the soft crease of her brow. Her eyes where he saw his own image asea, looking too rough, her lips parted slightly as if she too were bewildered. This shadow caused in him such unwonted agitation that he must pinch her to break the spell, her protest and black look sending him into instant disfavor so they were again on solid ground.

So it was that he always found himself too unsure of reality; once in this way he did enter her room, but she did not stir. He knelt close by her bed and it seemed she barely casement was open but nothing moved. A breeze lingered at the sill for a moment, escaping in a quiet sigh before it touched her, and the faint starlight dispossessed her of her natural color leaving her indurate as a marble goddess. He was disconsolate at this vision but dared not wake her. Only after sitting a while longer, until a thin mantle of cloud obscured the last tarnished light from the sky, did he lean and kiss the pulse at her neck. It throbbed with some fierce inspiration he could not long forget, laying sleepless in his own tomb like chamber. If blood could speak, hers would have condemned him just then for the genius of his deception.

So it was at these signposts, past, present and unknown he made his case, with the conviction that every falsehood perpetrated would only make eventual candor sweeter. He was single minded and knew but one truth; but in the years parted from her, the cosmos and all its inhabitants had become volatile. It was as if every reality he encountered or designed was merely a reflection on a soap bubble, hopelessly fragile and insubstantial. He'd given himself over on leaving Wuthering Heights to misery and toil to which Hindley's degradation paled. Pursuing death and dissipation he'd rendered from the wretchedness, a sovereignty. But as she reflected in her letter, it was everything, yet it was nothing.

This world of his she did not suspect, was built of such nebulous stuff as not to withstand the breath of life, and he determined that she should not arrive at it carelessly. Only if they went together, strong as they once were would it be consecrated.

If these affirmations flagged he had only to refresh his memory by observing the evening sky; how the wind took hold of it sending clouds tumbling across the horizon, the flashes of brilliance and gloom, how fast it moved taking the day and the waking world with it, and how swiftly into the starless aught time and all his foot soldiers vanished in their flight.

He could not reconcile himself with the life he'd left behind, or return to himself no matter how he longed to. No more did this landscape recognize him. The pronouncement was unalterable. Yet, despite his convictions, he consented that his nightmares were often the result of a mind too indisposed by its own schemes. It plagued him he had become his own false self. He likened it to being bound in a suit of rusted armor.

He kept a thought, a picture that both amused and tormented him. What if by grace he'd come back some different way? not as a stranger, but her errant love who had long since done penance and been reprieved through volumes of blotched and scented letters. How sweet, how blessed each bit of fortune and failure had it been imparted to her in its time; every ribbon saved for her displayed in mad profusion. He saw himself tramping up to that same door he'd fled from, no less subdued as if but a single night had passed, with sting of grief and jealousy turned to flames. Over and over this specious reunion smote him. After all he had done, he wanted only this and it was not to be, to give back to her whom she had lost.

His only recourse while in such limbo, was to exercise freely the only bit of his character which he retained decisively, an enterprising nature which served him well, even at his lowest . So finding it perilous to be with Cathy too many idle hours, but unable to excuse a formal distance as would be proper to any engagement [so Ellen insisted, though he thought it laughable] He resolved to occupy himself with the new, if dubious dream of home. It would be his first gift to her, this house, and if she never allowed another it was enough.

He'd sent for the finest things: rugs and lamps from China and India, urns and draperies from Egypt, vases from Japan, furniture from Italy and tapestries from Spain, her bedroom from Paris, and a painter to transform the walls so the rooms appeared infinite. In the interest of time, he procured from London whatever things two people might need to live comfortably for a while; however, he viewed these acquisitions with cool irreverence. He did not fool himself that any of them were a foreshadowing of true happiness. Where that lay he knew not as yet, and could not begin to guess, unless in the clamor of manufactured beauty she find her soul as it once was,and the person she had once loved .

The furniture from Paris came early before he had even made up his mind where it should go. As each side of the house was in green shadow, it was difficult to gage where the light was most agreeable. After being there once late into the evening, he at last chose a room on the eastern most corner. It was smaller than the others, but the moonlight fell directly through the wide windows from a clearing in the trees and lingered a good while, all shadow play in the sleepy dance of the hours.

He often stayed late making what repairs he could; repatriating establishments of flora and fauna,and restoring the gardens and the arbor to their former glory, until the house was recalled to its self with pleasing grace. It was inherently cheerful despite whatever mournful secrets its walls might hold. White pine, cherry wood, and tall windows made it a place of constant light, and in the parlor glass drops of a chandelier sent a parade of fragmented rainbows across the walls. Looking in these windows as children they had never noticed it. Perhaps because the lady there had long since ceased to light the tapers, and the curtains, drawn on every window but for the small space she peered out from, doused the colors.

At the end of two weeks time most of what he'd sent for from London had arrived, but the only room finished was hers. _Theirs_,and even that was furnished in spare optimism. The space where once a ghost had kept her watch was now hushed in ivory and rose, in drapes, and mirrors, which, catching the sky light in their purity, perished shadows at every angle.

Another week passed between himself and the house. It lay nearly forgotten again, untenanted in its verdant glade, though it felt as if the bright hush had reached out already from beyond its fortress moss and fern to muffle them in a kind of enchanted inertia. It seemed almost though there were no longer any precedence. They spoke little if at all of the wedding, of the world which lay beyond that day, but neither did they discuss any longer the past. Existence consisted at least for moment, only of the the hours between the rise of each days sun and moon;the flowers, trees, streams and fields which could be viewed from the topmost window of the heights.

Often of an evening, if it rained, or the ragged clouds persisted over the last low sunbeams , they stayed and made a jolly little family of themselves, Ellen and Hareton. Heathcliff, with a mind just as turned out to suspicions as hers, wondered now and then why Ellen, at twenty four had no beau. Never one suitor. How, if not versed in such things was she qualified to guide himself or Cathy; But, she had always done so from the beginning with uncanny instinct. She had been his confidant as long as he could remember, and able to worm secrets out of him that even Cathy found impermeable. It was Ellen who had instilled in him a sense of pride and even entitlement. He supposed this had been inadvertent, and later the seeds of virtue turned poison in him, but they served him while he was a child, for hope at least. She found him once, [he was no more than nine or ten] nursing a new set of bruises, taken by some novel and intricate scheme for remuneration. He had grown bored and unsatisfied simply wishing Hindley dead, and was so black and fierce she had hard work to make him a child again. She warned him not to look so dour, and remember the blessings he did have. After all, were he to trade places with the young master he might find worse miseries and more to lament. He asserted that was impossible. She asked him to picture Hindley's prospects, and compare them to his own. He did so. He saw the house Hindley would inherit, the land; then he saw him sitting alone and looking incredibly small, as if his surroundings were a wasteland, and he were exiled there. Imagining his own fate, the predictable scene arose. He stood outside with all doors shut to his face, doors of a pretty golden world, but turning he knew _he _was not alone. Cathy was there, as she was always, and would always be. Now tell me if you don't see the thing you love best, and if you don't feel quite fortunate? Said Ellen. And with that, he ran off to find what he loved best.

It seemed she was always disapproving of Cathy, and did not much like him, except in the capacity of nursemaid, until Mr Earnshaw died, and yet when he and Cathy were a conspiracy, she showed the greatest fondness for them both; however, with Hareton she evinced a tenderness she'd never shown either of them. No mother could have cared for her own child more, and as a result he was growing with promise. Barely four, he was a most engaging child, who appeared to have escaped ,unscathed from his fathers persecution. He already knew his letters, had a fondness for books, and could name nearly every plant growing around the Heights, yet he was not in the least precocious, and thought nothing of indulging in the most heinous acts of childhood where he could get away with them. If something was not broken, scribbled across, frightened out of its wits, or filled with dirt by the end of the day, then the world was not right. Also, he had inherited from his aunt, along with his looks, his penchant for a good temper tantrum. Looking at him, laboring over a shoe tie, or a new word, Heathcliff invariably went back to that one strange moment they had shared, the damned catching the damned as they fell from the sky. Two children staring at each other in astonishment. It was true, he could not have been more stricken had it been Hindley whose fall he'd broken. It was a crucifixion. But having done, thereafter, he felt an inexplicable connection to the little boy. He could never explain it entirely without sounding insane, but he saw the worst and the best of himself there.

With that, he found another particular to arrest his imagination. The possibility of his and Catherine's own children. The idea did not visit Heathcliff with brimming joy as might befit any young bridegroom. Perhaps it was the keen sting of being an orphan, still haunting him, or the women he had seen in the streets of Liverpool bleeding their lives out without the aid of a doctor , or even Francis. The way her screams had wrung through the house until the very walls were transformed by agony. Running as far as he could away from the house he could still hear them, even after she died. The thought of Catherine suffering so was unbearable, and the worst, he dared not think of at all. She would have the best doctors, midwives, shamans if need be, from around the world, whatever magic it took to save her from the fate of those women. If she was not fit for such labor, there were ways to avoid it. Death _was not _an inevitability, and neither were children. Heirs were not his priority. It was not possible to be happier than he was with her alone. Besides they were so young, and she had never showed one maternal inclination. Still, very often Hareton would sit between them with a favorite book, reading until his head nodded against his shoulder. Half asleep he'd make himself at home in Cathy's arms, and as in the old days, when he was first a motherless little thing, she'd sing to him, weaving some ancient dark fairytale with her golden voice; an endless thread to follow, to Lethe. He could understand then, the enchantment of it, how sweet to see her so with their own child.

Between his fears, his desires, and Ellen's constant vigilance, as if , like when he was a boy she could spy out his thoughts, he came to the conclusion that he had been too careless. He would never consider it unseemly in the least, that he and Cathy slept in the same bed. It was as natural as anything else they shared, and yet,caught in the spell of sleep they were each subject to whatever whims it entertained. Once, he awoke in her arms from such a vivid dream, that neither of them knew for a long while what had happened; but as reality crept back in they realized the error could not have occured. Feeling each unsettled they spent the rest of the night in a nervous fit, unable to stay asleep completely, both of them all the while secretly trying to recover the pieces of the dream and put it back together.


	12. Anodyne

Through reluctant accord they ended their precarious bargain with Morpheus, limiting their cohabitation to the hours between dawn and dusk; spare hours! But scarce would he dare articulating to her how he lamented the agreement, lest she arrive at some hopeless remedy against which he could invent no refusals. Still, she _would _remain longer than prudence condoned, and this for one end [she swore];justification. He had made sport of her through outright deception; somehow she'd turned the game deftly on him, and now would see it to its conclusion no matter.

So they continued; a single taper lit and set into an obscure sconce so as not interfere. She gave herself over to his hands, a wondrous blind, for a half hours space; unless she bested him, for she had learned to control her own travels with some shrewdness of insight, gathering more intelligence of the presented scenes and their details than he would have wanted. Too often upon her report, discovering with alarm that she'd slipped ahead to some yet unguarded outpost of remembrance, he found it expedient to end the game immediately. Returning briefly to those hands, if during the course of these sojourns they became very soft, and forgetful of their post, distracted by a lock of hair, or a singular adumbration of lace curving with subdued disregard about a certain paleness in their vicinity, it was never noted remarkably. She had learned to concentrate without his oppressive aid, and gather the available darkness about her in such a way as to shut out all extraneous distractions at will. His voice was all that remained a guiding current coming and going as the hush of nightfall, still she was often surprised to remember it, coming close as it did in the warmth of breath.

"What do you see now Catherine?"

"A sad forest of sorts; the trees are spare and ugly as if they have been starved. They rise like pale spindles from the ground and yet the sun still cannot dispel the gloom they cast..they are more like spirits, Not trees at all. Wraiths of a most solemn and horrifying purpose. I feel I must turn around..

''Nonsense. They _are _but trees to what purpose would they menace you?''

"Then I see, it is not the trees. The trees are but sentinels for something there. I am listening, straining my ears yet I hear nothing, not the chattering of birds or even the rustle of the slightest thing beneath the leaves. Not even a breath of wind. This seems a dead place...more than dead but death itself! My limbs are so very heavy I feel they should plunge me into the earth. I see now shadows along the ground,and the lowering sun has painted the earth a garish hue,and the air is sickening,cloying..and now there is but one sound,a terrible singing coming from beyond the woods..''

He had not meant at all for her to come to this place. It happened quite by accident, for he'd intended some time just beyond. His mind had gone round this place for years, only daring pass its perimeters now and again in reckless moments; now his conscious had betrayed him cleverly. He knew howsoever she might cringe at the creeping darkness before her, she would not be swayed to depart it should he protest. If the game was ended abruptly she would only find herself there again at its next commencement. He knew well the sound too; the voice followed by the low thin cry of a fiddle, how it would draw her on and on ,past his reach like the call of a banshee. Then with no resolution before him he gathered his will, and with greatest effort transformed the scene into the nearest thing available to his mind. Consequently, they found themselves not in that forest across the great sea with its bone like trees and blood soaked floor, but in the mossy emerald sanctuary of Mytholme. To his relief, though quite alert to the sudden breech, she was not contrary but amused.

"Heathcliff, how droll,shall I follow you by your apron strings back into infancy?''

''what do you mean by that?"

"It is the little forest where we played a summer or two,in happier times.''

''Have you seen it since then?''

''No, I have not..I am a stranger to all but Wuthering Heights''

''Then how do you recognize it, out of all other forests after so many long years?''

''I would always know it if it were a thousand years behind me. I thought once it was our home, a place the fairies kept for us alone..and there was a house. Heathcliff do you remember the house?''

This revelation had such an effect on his conscience he dare not speak for a moment, and when he did at last impiety put him out of danger.

''I recall some hovel we trespassed one time too many. I'm sure its turned to earth by now.''

''In eight years, you think time is truly so ravenous?''

''Time, and the weather. It was barely standing was it not?''

''Splendidly..is your memory so fickle?''

''I remember a ghost..such ghosts don't live in splendor''

He'd forgotten again while she leaned on his arm, feats of strategy and diversion, and the game entirely. He was only following her idly as old, down an ancient path, preoccupied with this rock, that abandoned nest, a rabbit hole; the quickening of life in a rain pool between the roots of a tree, and the prophecy of the sky. His own shadow preceding him gliding across bark and branch.

''Heathcliff! It _is_ there I can see it far ahead, still standing, and very fair it is after all. Someone must live in it for there are flowers, and the little gate has been repaired, and new drapes hung, though I can nearly see into the window-''

What was he to do? He could not make her open her eyes if she would not so he shook her, and this only made her laugh.

''What are you doing now?''

''You must stop Catherine..someone will see you.''

This only made her laugh harder, and still she would not open her eyes, though tears ran from the corners down her face, and she pitched herself forward steadying herself on his knee.

''You surpass yourself! Who is here with us? how very rude, you must tell them so or explain or me honestly why you would have us flee such a peaceful place.''

She fell silent ,lacing her fingers into a pillow beneath her cheek and keeping her sheltered position.

When she spoke again, all the summer had gone from her voice.

''I am weary of this game anyhow. I think you mean to make a dunce out of me, and if you keep to it this way I shall have to turn on you.''

He retrieved the candle and held it to her face until he heard the crackle of fine hair. Turning around she snatched it from him, burning her palm and fingers. He felt this more than she, and the flame was not extinguished only brighter.

''Very well. You've spoiled it entirely. I will not be burned for it like a moth.''

Sitting quiet again, she played with the flame; her fingers danced through and across it, transforming the room into a forest of riotous shadows. Examining a bit of tallow which had coursed down her hand to form the pattern of a star she then continued, staid and careful in her words, but not harsh.

''I know you have hidden something from me,a great deal in fact. It is the reason you seem so strange now..you must exercise the strength of Hercules every hour to keep _yourself_ at bay,and play host to this new man, whoever he is. But why with myself who knows better? I can only wonder at your reticence, and conclude that your new worldliness has made me seem like a simple fool. Perhaps you look back at me and see only an apostate, and though you love me it is too much to risk the same treachery. How shall we live an entire lifetime this way?''

He was surprised that she could be so accurate, while still remaining so completely ignorant, but what else was she to believe?

"An Apostate? I should not care if you turned on me a thousand times, if it were a thousand faithless days in my presence. You have erred so in your perceptions,all but one.

''And what be that ?''

''I will only say if you perceive a fool it is not yourself but the brute who hides his face day after day; but if you have only a little forbearance, he shall prove himself something more wondrous to you.''

''How will he unless it is to be as he was? Wonder enough. You cannot hide from me every minute though.''

She held the candle close to his face; her quick intake of breath, the soft exhalation, and the flame too respired in a shiver of heat and incense against his skin. He felt damned and wondered if he would fail after all. Walking with her again in that place of long ago innocence he had not wanted to leave at all, but stay wandering that lane with her just ahead at the edge of his shadow.

''I see, It flickered there and now it is strong. Your prisoner will not be silenced so easily.''

''As easy as this.''

He blew out the flame, and in the brilliance extinguished, an afterimage remained; a child on a bright road, there then gone.

''If it is all so grave as that Heathcliff, then I must ask a pardon for being so forward, I suppose, but I believe nothing I hear in your sweet words and do not pride yourself that I do. You are an intemperate single minded thing and well I know not without one self serving motivation.''

"So where is the issue? What serves me serves us both.''

''Ah, see now, you are suddenly bored of me, leaning back there behind the curtain and crossing your arms. Better I should bite my tongue off than be such a harridan.''

He had drawn back, but not in defense. He was only attempting to discern her in the blackness of the room.

''She repents in haste Here are a charlatan and a heretic, compliments! Take heart, we shall probably erase each other yet and be the better for it.''

''Bleak and scornful..but it does me good more than not, for it is not unlike you,but _you _entirely.''

''What sad convenience that you have learned to expect so little! But it is stupid for us to sit here and trade insults all night when we could part and dream of better things in silence.''

"Oh that my dreams were so enticing. I fall asleep and find I am only outside my own window, or walking up the hill from the house. Only once I dreamed some wild event, but never mind. If yours are so much more glorious I will leave you to them.''

"They are not so different from yours at all.''

"But different all the same because they _are_ yours. I wish I knew just what they were.''

'' I will tell you one if it pleases you. Perhaps I have been too spartan; but tomorrow. We agreed anyhow not be idle this way, and the moon sailed away on the witching hour long ago."

'' shall I say goodnight so soon? A curse on all hasty bargains then.''

She stirred to take her leave, or he thought so. She started and sighed, a lightness shifting near him,

then only stood near in the dark for a moment as if she were lost. Her step, the brush of her slipper on the carpet, a sound only delirium could hear, and the graze of cloth across his arm as she moved away made him miserable beyond words. Though he knew better than to seek such alleviation, leaning forward he caught her, drawing her back.

''Does it ever appear to you the world is only illusion and chance? So much so that everything we dream is futility. Hours and days blown about like chaff. What are visions if they can only be imparted to the self same flimsy stuff? Yet in all the capriciousness if one desire persists, if one vision asserts its own integrity is that not enough to validate the whole? Unless one were to lose that star to improvident ambition, then what anarchy conscience would be host to.

'' How often have I woke in just such chaos and wondered _how _without the will to depart, or the means to thrive shall I exist there? And with no other company but the din of my own voice; but visions-I know them well. For me it is the earth abiding and the sky forever in transition. Between them, as between heaven and hope the turmoil is hushed ,and in the stillness _there _is the assurance that I am real. Even so, the peace inherent in these things is like a voice I cannot make myself believe I have heard unless...

''_Unless I know that you have heard it too''_

His echo spent itself in Catherine's quiet laugh, a subdued inspiration mocking the gloom before dissolving into silence. This was broken in short by the clock striking one, in a funereal rhythm floating up from nowhere and making the night tremble in its decline.

Even as he willed her to go he could not help but keep her from it; so they remained at the side of the dreary couch. Feeling the the brush of her hand against his face and across his eyes, he believed even paradise could well be affirmed a bland contrivance while so obscured. Such benevolence entertained no reasoning. She wore around her neck a piece of jewelry on a fragile chain; a promise he'd given her in lieu of her wedding band. He kissed the chain, pressed it to the gentle rise above the band of her gown, and tasted with her skin, the infinitesimal links like silver rain. she lay her head on his, brown waves on black waves; her weight against his, across his knee was at once _all _he perceived of himself, sensible of own being only as it was assigned to hers. all the while rebelling, mapping the bright serpentine to its ruby heart and letting his own resolve betray him. Conscience, determination were two-face tricksters indeed; and he as ever was willing to turn them out to her. He knew the strength of his arms about _her,_ as if the prospect of his own vitality heretofore had not existed. He knew his breath was warm, sent back against his skin from hers. He knew his hands were capable by how she answered for them as they sought her out, drawing on her, a soft absolute. No wife could ever know of a husband or hope to know, as much as she did then of him; while leaving her disciples yet blameless, love in her madness unwound so many of her mysteries. Impossible they should be so denied again; that she should depart and shut herself up alone in the sterile chamber across the hall. How many times since his return had this scene been played out, and each an apocalypse, and how many times again before reprieve.

''Heathcliff do you mean to turn me out again?''

Strangely, there was an icy conviction in her tone. It jarred him, if imperceptibly, out of a trance, but still he could not answer, lest the words precede him;'_You shall not go' _for tending toward old passions and regrets he would speak on impulse_. _Oh if she would not go, if night faded just in this way and dawn found them, as in his old dream, changed, but endeared by a thousand details. He''d soon forget all but those hours. He could not bargain with himself any longer, could not repay his conscience.

"No. You shall stay. Please stay.''

''And what then, Heathcliff?"

"Oh Cathy. My heart I don't _know.''_

"I know. You will wake up tomorrow and want to revenge yourself on the entire world again. Is there nothing you hate more than weakness? I will not be part of it and be despised in the bargain. If I thought it were any other way I would be with you now as I long to be. As I am dying to be. Whatever plan you've conjured that requires such dishonesty must be played out I suppose, for your own peace."

Though he was relieved, he trembled visibly from the loss of her_. _He could scarcely speak it wracked him so forcibly, like a drunk whose morning blood shrieks out for his poison.

"My darling, you pay entirely too much attention to me. But you are right. I think you could have executed me at the end of your little chain."

He clasped the silvery thing in his fingers, caressed it and kissed the dark jewel, and doing so he noticed with some shame that he had left a mark high on her left breast, the exact shape and color of that ruby.

"If you kissed me now I think I might confess anything."

"Precisely the problem.. _anything-"_

"If you lay with me, and I _don't _mean sleep, I could swear off a thousand sins and find a thousand places to leave them, as I have left this small one here.''

And he touched the little bruise below her collarbone.

"Are you guilty of thousand sins?"

"I could be. But I think, only one unpardonable.''

"You see, you make sport of everything.''

"Not so..''

"What?''

"You have no idea do you."

"Of ?"

"Of how much-''

She put her fingers to his mouth. In truth, she was afraid of what she might hear. Perhaps if he did not love her so, she would not be the cause of so much grief. She would rather believe his regard was less if it meant his pain was less in turn.

"Goodnight Heathcliff."

With that she was gone. Across the hall, which may as well have been a bottomless canyon, and barred into her tomb. A sepulcher with one window whose sill and frame were scarred with names. Heathcliff, Cathy, Catherine Earnshaw, Cathy Heathcliff.

The emptiness, he soon found, was unendurable. _This_ Grief had no semblance whatsoever to the silly debacle from weeks past, when they had beat each other up like children fighting over a toy. Unexperienced as he was, the minute tendernesses of that night, how she had allowed him to loosen her hair, how she had kissed him first, and put her too warm hands beneath his shirt, now seemed only the cursory trials of a harmless curiosity; a lark, though it had turned into a siege. He could only compare this agony to the night she had been seized by the Linton's, the stark and sudden division; the love and admiration which, overwhelming him, had no avenue. Yet even that explanation didn't do. He had been deliberately unguarded despite the promises to himself, because as he drew her near again, as they sat tangled up in each other, the disparity and the lonesomeness thrust upon them in their innocence was obliterated. Utterly vanquished. Cruelty, misery, and degradation had failed to alter destiny. There they were presented with their fate and still they denied it. There was good cause, certainly and yet it seemed unconscionable.

He'd endured much in his short life; eighteen years to scourge and be scourged. His only reprieve, his only purpose was her. His constant. The intemperate soul with its sounding, searching eyes. What reason to torture her and himself needlessly for his stupid beliefs? But it was done now. She would see him through it. She would refute his weakness. He felt as if his soul had been triturated, and worse an ache in his body such as he had never known before nearly crippled him. Like dull, hot swords through and through him. He tried to sleep but the pillow smelled of her. He threw it away from himself only to find the entire bed as sweet; His own skin, haunted with that faint bloom was the worst hell he could endure. When he closed his eyes he saw the little tattoo he'd left on her. He wanted to kiss her with the passion which had left that brand, to leave the raw blush across her lips and every where, a gardener of secret roses. To share her breath and hear her voice, whatever pain or rapture it might impart with his, as they lay together for the first time. It was a simple enough dream, and he had turned it into something insane. He wanted to make love to her the night she found him at the marsh, he wanted her the night he ran; to come back to her, to answer her penitence and lay his own down in her arms. When he returned to Wuthering Heights, when she returned from the Linton's , all the nights she crept silently into the stable to comfort them both, and always and forever, since the time he first understood what such things were; Not owing in any way to concupiscence, far far from it. It was the only place he had not been with her . It was the final ceremony in two lives otherwise inseparable, and his love as deep as hers would never withstand a single diversion. But when had it occurred as a pleasure? He had some idea, but did not want to think about it.

He lay, perspiring like one gripped with consumption. He wanted her so he could have sweat blood for the longing. The room seemed to pulse with heat but he could not open the window. He saw a chapel, an isle, a dark haired girl in a white dress at an altar, and the isle stretched on and on into years. He knew it was only two weeks, but of all the things he mistrusted, time's treachery was paramount.

There was no negotiating. He emptied a bottle of wine, but somehow only felt worse with the romantic elixir coursing through his veins. He had something, he'd kept it without knowing why. No wine this, no potion, but a destroyer, of pain, of thoughts, of regret. Of life if need be. It was opium, and he had a queer way of assimilating it which might have made the worst degenerate shudder. He locked the door because he would not be seen by her , kneeling on the floor cutting his own arm. It was disgusting, but effective, and if his fingers shook trying to hold the reed steady they would not for long. He bandaged his arm and unbarred the door.

The heat, whether imagined or an actual breeze from hell, was unbearable. He stripped to his skin and lay face down on the bed unconcerned over his immodesty; if heaven was spying on him let it see what was in his soul as well, and either grant that desire or strike him dead as he was. Under the effects of the poison now he felt heavy, sweet and painless and he cared no longer about anything. She did not leave him though, his love. The chill of approaching morning tempered his visions somewhat, and what he wanted was just out of reach. In the fluctuations of warm and cool air, the war between night and new dawn, he knew again the absolute of her embrace, their bodies together indissoluble. The softness of the bed beneath him was maddening; it seemed she _should _be there, warm and substantial, but she was just out of knowing. he could feel again and again the ascent, the yielding and the abandon they had been so close to, and the ecstasy of falling into nothing.

He walked in a place by the sea; castles of stone, tall grasses, curious flowers rose and fell around him. Letting his fingers brush by them, testing the different textures with his mind , in the deluge of sensation he felt as if he were all things. He felt the caress of his own fingertips, as if _he_ were garden and monolith at once; simultaneously he knew their peculiar qualities. And the adamantine and the petal and the flesh became one indistinguishable thing . He was with her again in the marsh; in her arms, commanded by that kiss which desiring everything, held back nothing. Instead of the sudden emptiness, the awful weightlessness of parting, The dark ground rose up to meet them, and they were one in a tumble earth and sky. She was real. Only himself and her real as it had always been. The rose-salt taste of her, the relentless inquisition, confession and absolution in the exchange of touch. Claimed by the deftness of her hands, inspired and perfect, he was no longer ashamed of his scars, or of the color of his skin. There was no pain, no consequence or reckoning only the elation of being, centered in her, deeper with every breath drawn; the animal pleasure mixed with the impossible sweetness. He wanted to see her eyes, to hear her say his name but it seemed the only thing providence disallowed; an accolade reserved for another sphere of paradise, distant as yet, and less changeable. It seemed then, the marsh grew up around them, tendrils, and sinews of night devouring them, digesting them into stars and planets, spreading them out across the impossible chasm of eternity. He never slept, he only floated, dazed and cold in that blackness, until the sun came with a pardon.


	13. The visitor

He was sick; a violent nausea awoke him and in the effort to quell it he awakened even greater miseries. His head pounded and his body felt as if it had been stretched on a wheel. Still he managed to close his eyes for a while longer, until the first molten specks of dawn warmed the sky. He came around to the sensation of being deserted. By all rights,he should not have felt so, in his five minute slumber, he dreamed that Catherine came back, and lay next to him yet, paralyzed in the softness of sleep; but something indiscernible, whether dream or idea changed form in his grasp. Too indolent for once to open his eyes or alert his mind to it, he lay there letting it toss his consciousness about like the wind moves a pile of leaves.

It was a keen feeling of absence, as if someone had just left the room and closed the door decisively. One by one his senses returned him to the surface, and yet he could not wake entirely; the cold pungence of wet earth and ozone filled the room through broken window;the sun's icy glare rose and concentrated itself in one brilliant shaft, piercing through the top where the boards had not covered. He tried to turn away from it,but its ghost remained, a bright burnished haze all around him.

Still the emptiness pressed on him,until he at last thought if he woke Catherine, where she dwelt heedless in their shared half world, he could dispel it, even locked in her balmy slumber and his restless. She responded only by throwing her arm across him, an arm surprisingly heavy for the substance of a phantasm. She smelled fresh and green, and this, charged with the scent of the passing storm, and the warmth of the room defying the cold light of day, was dissipating. His consciousness was only manifest within her, as it had been in the nights hallucination, and the waking world was not between them. It was then he understood what it was.

The sentinels were gone. Either they had faded with dawn in true ghost fashion,or they had left decisively abandoning their posts. Whatever, they were gone,and his mind still half asleep did not interpret this literally, but quite distinctly nonetheless through a shift in awareness.

A pattern of sound,which he had ignored for as long as possible, repeated itself again. It was a drumming, but as insignificant as the tramp of distant feet. It announced itself again,this time loud,and close enough so he came around at last in alarm. It was Ellen banging at the door to his chamber, assuming he supposed, Catherine had passed the night there.

"Miss Catherine, open door for heavens sake!''

He ignored her, musing for a black moment on the disquieting notions which must be visiting her, then answered back in his best _théâtre de Cathy _

''What is it Ellen, tell me and go away, I'm afraid we are terribly indisposed''

"How is it _so_?"

The poor woman sounded frightened,as if she might be soon put out of breath from shock.

"Embarrassingly so.'' He went on, and was about to add some piece of tepid vulgarity when he heard Catherine's door fly open. Ellen's relief was as palpable as the groan of the heavy hinges, and Cathy's voice, still heavy and bewildered with sleep;

''What is it, what disaster demands such a racket?"

''You must come out Miss,it is urgent!''

''I cannot.. tell it to wait until a godly hour..go away!''

Absolutely not! comb your hair and dress yourself well, you have _company_.''

She hissed this last word out between her teeth in a very odd manner, as if she'd found the bite of poison in something formerly sweet and agreeable.

''Company, what company, send them away! I do not have to receive anyone!''

''I think this visitor will not be refused miss''

Again, the ominous whisper, and then something else he could not discern, which ended Cathy's groggy protest effectively. She slammed the door, and assured Ellen from the other side she would not be longer than a quarter hour coming down. Ellen asked if she might not help expedite the departure. There was a brief silence, then her door opened again.

''I am not a baby, be gone!"

Ellen, already with Hareton on one hip was more than dismayed at finding herself on an early mission to her contrary mistress . A few more minutes of arguing followed; He stood at his own door listening, but couldn't make out the details of the exchange,only that they sounded like a pair of assassins disputing the fate of a body. In a moment Ellen had her assurance again, and departed now with the boy in tow, for he had insisted on visiting 'Mean Cathy', and rebuked, would not go without serious protest. Heathcliff followed their voices into the kitchen until they disappeared. Assuming she must be returning to the imminent guest, he wondered why anyone of such urgent presence should be received at the back of the house. Curiosity, solicitude would naturally have him downstairs inquiring into this, but he could not forget he was a guest here yet, as sure as he had once been a servant, and must keep to himself. This did nothing to elevate his spirit from its eternal dusk, but in furtherance of his present cause it was ideal.

Still evaluating the strange emptiness which awakened him, he relinquished his post and retreated back in to the sterile depths of the couch. Had he not felt so strange he would have gone to her immediately as he did every morning if she was not punctually at his side, but as it was he could not move. Feeling poorly he was still under the spell of the drug. How foolish he was; once he had been strong enough to commit assaults upon his own being that amounted to immolation. After running from her he could survive the rack at its most diabolical limits, now he could not survive a night if she should be only as distant as the next room and the coming day. But It was _her_ weakness which beat him more than his own.

The sickness, perhaps more than just the spell of the drug, was presently unbearable. His skull throbbed with the reverberation of a tower bell, nausea twisted him until he longed to be out of doors breathing in the ice of the morning even if it should it pass through him like a thousand needles; But the claustrophobic shadows pressed him, and the light struggling over the board at the window was now enfeebled by a bank of thick clouds, so he sat in utter gloom.

He attempted to arrange himself while he listened for Catherine. This was a ritual he'd never made peace with, not since the first time he'd been required to leave his rustic rags and truss himself up like a fop. Perhaps it was his hatred of this, or his desire from childhood, having associated such imprisonments with the stuff of nightmares, to be perpetually unbound. Or maybe it was something in his heritage,but the stiff clothes, even the black and the dark which he could hide well within, never were right.

Giving himself a cursory, disinterested glance in the glass he could not help but see a ridiculous puppet. He swore, pulling his collar up so it resembled an exact noose, and seeing there a fetching corpse, that they would migrate very soon to a climate of intemperate heat where the only requirements were tunics.

Put away at last, and the worse for it, he sat with his head in his hands letting the close darkness alleviate the pain in his head. How to end this pointless grief, with its flashes of ecstasy like the glint off a sword, was just beyond him. It was less than two weeks until they were married, when they might at last end the charade, more difficult and elaborate with each passing day,and be themselves once more; though it seemed impossible they should see another day out in such a manner. His hands were still haunted with her, sweet cicely, violet and pine, and something else;a faintness of amber and gardenia stirring his memory strangely.

How rapidly he discovered while sitting alone and dazed, the wonders of his acquired megalomania,how it remained a steadfast bastion of his aim and fortitude, while suddenly revealing through careful study a wealth of chinks and vulnerabilities, which he might pass through easily were he to change his form but a little.

What were the convenient obstacles which bound him so far to inaction? The evidence of Catherine's terrible illness, fortified by Ellen's superstitions and the affirmation that he had been the entire cause. How could he in his ignorance think to uproot her any further with unconventional absurdities and puerile impulsiveness? Even though it was the one action which might save them. The truth was,with no plan but to destroy himself he'd at last come up at a stalemate ; but now the very idea which once seemed the worst appeared like a beacon. There was no reason at all they should not flee immediately, marry tomorrow and be gone. It would be the restorative and the balm for everything.

He was no better, but at least at ease, seeing no reason for her dissent. He would give the house in Mytholme over to Ellen , to avoid any misunderstandings with the landlord of Wuthering Heights. She would not be so far from Catherine should they return, and Hareton would not be cast out into the wind.

He was at the point of seeking her out when she entered without ceremony, though It was her habit to knock at least once. a queer thing as she never waited for his reply. He was at instantly set back by her appearance,which taken in entirely caused his heart to twist in its cage.

She was drained of color, so much so that her skin had sickly hue, the greenish precursor of death, and her eyes cast shadows on her cheeks. It was not only her face and skittish manner which alerted him, but her attire. The light summer dress she customarily wore in the morning was replaced by a dark, heavy, perse frock fastened a good way up to her chin. Her hair was combed straight and bound into a knot. She had a scarf around her neck as if it were winter. All in all she appeared a most unlikely vision of modesty, and if it weren't for her grave expression, as dark as the matronly guise she stood in, he thought he might have died from laughter.

''Catherine what is the catastrophe?''

He was abashed at the tenderness in his own voice. Determined not to quail , he'd tried only for lightness and come out soft and silly as down. Glancing at him, her brow puckered and a fey spark of amusement lit her features and passed. She cast her eyes down then, fingers clasping and unclasping in a nerveless dance.

''None whatsoever. I haven't slept, that's all. Nothing that can't be remedied, but I think I shall keep quiet today all the same.''

He was perplexed at her tone, at the finality of it, as if 'keep quiet' meant 'I shall die'.

''Then I shall _keep quiet _with you.''

''That is a arduous task, and you are not looking well at all. was the night so bad?''

"I had a strange dream. It kept me awake awhile, thats all.''

''So did I-''

"Tell me then.''

"I don't think I can.."

She seemed flustered, turning white, then red then pale again. She smiled a little then but it faded as quick,and stepping forward as she often did to embrace him she only stood, fixing him with a troubled gaze.

''Whoever your forgotten guest is downstairs I hope they are not too verbose, for I wish to discover the true cause behind that look of yours and dispel it promptly.''

''How do you know there is someone downstairs? Were you listening -''

''Never mind. I only wish for you to be free quickly for I have news that will not wait.''

''Very well. Whatever you like''

and she clasped his hands as if he were in danger of slipping away.

''But will you only stay here for a while. I must be gone for an hour alone. Swear you will keep to your chamber until I call you''

''This is infernal. If there is something wrong you must tell me else I take drastic measures''

She stammered a reply, looking so dire he scarce repeat his demand. Her hands, though holding his in a vice, trembled as if weak with palsy.

''It is as I said! It will be remedied directly if you will only be forbearing. You are always contrary and it won't do now!''

He could not rebuke her, though sickness and impatience had at last worn him ragged.

''Fine. How am I to question you when you have presented such a tragic picture. I will not stay here above an hour though so beware.''

Before he had even finished his sentence she fled, Leaving him to contend once more with that strange emptiness.

With all good intention he'd made his promise, but even speaking it knew he would not keep it long. He managed to remain for a quarter of an hour but everywhere he turned he was met with some object or aspect to remind him of the previous night and all that preceded it: a ribbon from her slipper, they had searched a good while for it before giving up, the spent candle, an odd bouquet of herbs and night flowers now closed against the light, an empty bottle of wine, and the commedia which had fallen to the floor some nights ago and remained there face up and forgotten. "_Remember tonight for it is the beginning of always.''_

The shirt he'd worn the night before lay on the floor as well. Picking it up his hands were freshly painted with that sibylline fragrance, and his mind where it was always akin to those things living close to earth discerned beneath it an alchemy, something of both hope and perdition.

He stood for a long time at his door, that he might determine for himself what her grim appearance and disappearance prophesied. What visitor, and he knew it was not insomnia ,unless sleep had sent death in its place, warranted such obsequies. He heard nothing at all, as if he were listening down a well, not even the chattering of Ellen and her charge. The the unnerving pall drew him on until he at last stood at the railing, leaning out and peering into the caverned shadows of the kitchen.

After a spell of listening so intently that everything else was forgotten,but that he _was_ listening, the silence abandoned his senses in a confusion of voices coming at once from the front of the house. Two voices, low, but in urgent protest against one another clashed against the still morning like waves against breakers, over-reaching so he could not hear what was said. He only knew one; Catherine's tone full of thorns and petals as it had been earlier with him.

With respect to her precarious condition he knew it was prudent to retreat, but he would not be moved, and the notion she had deceived him even in the smallest way assured it. There was she,the black flower of his soul, cut through by a sheath of light stealing in past the open parlor door. Her back was to him,so he saw long before being seen. Another figure had traced her retreat into the house, and it was one he knew well from his most bitter hours. Edgar Linton.

It seemed at once as if he'd stepped into his own ghost,where it had been waiting two years; in the shadow of a beam on the stairs. Rage, as clean as a new sword with an edge of argent sweetness cut through him, as keenly as it had then.

Edgar Linton. He remembered with rare bliss,[only that it were an atonement!] the last time he saw the picaroon, taking a beating from Cathy, felled like a fencepost in the wind and with not enough blood in him to hold back his tears. He'd gained height in two years, though duly noted with exact derision, nothing else. He was a vision of impotence; attired completely in colorless frippery, his fair hair powdered, the only evidence to attest that he was not a lifeless puppet were two spots of pink on his cheeks from some excess of agitation. Now instead of fury, Heathcliff felt only a disappointing revulsion.

Cathy was halfway across the room, a defensive position against his advance, so the argument was nearly below him.

''Catherine you must give me a reason for this. I have so far been patient with your absurd explanations,but I begin to think one of us is not right. I return after a month expecting to fetch my _wife _from this comfortless place,and now..what in God's name do you mean you _rescind? _And you shall be gone in a fortnight. Gone how,where?"

''It is not your affair unless you've pulled some trick to appoint yourself my guardian. If so give me proof . I told you, I relinquish any claim I have on Wuthering heights, and the land is yours as well. I will have the papers drawn up.''

''Is this one of your jokes Catherine? What have I to do with this inhospitable chunk of rock besides that it is dear to you?''

''Ah,there is the heart of it! I'm sure I would soon be as worthless to you as _that-''_

_'' _I am not a dupe . Do not feed me nonsense and expect a hearty thanks for the disclosure. I can only conclude some bad spirit has warped your judgment.''

''So will you have me locked away then,as you did my brother? I suppose I shall be incarcerated either way.''

''What is this madness! _I,_ at my own expense did your brother a good turn. Were it not for me he'd not be enjoying even the benevolence of a madhouse,but swinging at the end of a rope.''

''And I see now such a fate would be preferable to your charity!''

Heathcliff absorbing this unbelievable diatribe had moved quite unconsciously,forward. His sickness came back twofold and he clutched the railing. Some sound from the kitchen, a flurry of wind knocking a shutter open or one of the dogs tipping over a dish, alerted them. Glancing up Edgar saw him instantly. At first he appeared baffled and Heathcliff knew he'd not been recognized, but turning about to follow his gaze,Cathy clasped her hands to her face and gave forth the most pathetic cry of despair.

He had no choice but to come forth and show himself,though not without a malignant pleasure, watching the mans face as it went from bafflement to indignation but still not recognition.

Edgar spoke,keeping his gaze On Heathcliff as if to remove it might mean escape.

''Catherine. What is the meaning of this.''

"It is nothing sir, I am a Paying tenant here. How else was miss Earnshaw to make her living in the absence of a benefactor? But If I am to understand it, you are the owner of Wuthering heights. Confirm it and I shall reimburse you three times what I have offered her, providing you leave her in peace.

''I am-''

Heathcliff began,without counting the coins or paper, to empty his pockets onto the floor. The rattle of each sovereign on the boards seemed to unnerve Edgar by degrees. After hesitating, he bent to collect them, and raising up once more, stared for a moment; His face colored,and then blanched, his expression suffering through several pained contortions before setting itself into a mask of baffled fury.

''I know you..but it can't be''

''You haven't answered me. Is that enough for you to leave her be,or do you require further recompense?''

When he did not reply,but to tremble visibly with restrained rage, Heathcliff stepped closer to him. Catherine who had taken up a post by the hearth came to life at once flying at the two of them and seizing the lesser one,making of herself an ineffectual shield. But Heathcliff ,satisfied with the effects so far produced hadn't the slightest inclination to knock him down.

"Heathcliff don't!''

'' So it is true then'' He said,pushing her aside. '' You've been sheltering this _miscreant _in my absence. So there is the reason you have turned against me. By god what black art has called you up again, and from where _Mr _Heathcliff. Well no matter I shall turn you out by the law and have you brought up for larceny.''

''I have a witness here to say I have offered you in rent nearly the worth of the house for Larceny I think you would look quite the fool for I have only sought, and succeeded for Catherine's sake to revive this house which you have left in disrepair. You'd be hard pressed to lay claim to any object in it. but there is only one here that concerns me and you may send the rest up in a conflagration for all I care''

Edgar looked from one to the other in astonishment,the color rising to his face again as if he were bathed in a pink light.

"I see now. This is too much to be believed!Certainly then it is a task beyond my strength for obviously it is not feebleness of mind but a malignancy of character which has stricken you and made you a game recruit for this huckster. I'd still warn you to liberate yourself expediently,but I am convinced it is too late."

''It is bad enough you haven't the conscience to speak even one cordial word,but how dare you to slander me. You have proved yourself a fool and villain all in one breath. Take council with yourself now and ask if anyone should agree, finding nothing beyond your character to compel them,to tie themselves to such a cowardly abject thing. I knew your nature,from the start,petty and defective,but you surpass it and grow more foul by the minute.''

''I shall not Extend this nightmare any longer. I will leave you for now to whatever unwholesome device you live by. But look sharp for the law is unerring in principal,and doubtless it will find enough corruption here to fill a book.''

He took his leave without a another word,banging the door closed behind him so the glass in the casements rattled.

They remained,the parlor still rebounding with force of the terrible scene,at a mute distance from one another. He knew he must look like a madman,for the restraint he had shown now fired like a trap and his blood was boiling. Catherine stood against the back of a chair,but there was a wild look about her and she kept him fixed with a baleful gaze. He felt some queer involuntary contraction of his frame,as if his body would move without his will, the impetus of the preceding horror still carrying him forward . In the same instant,Catherine with the instincts of a hare turned and bolted out the door, not bothering to shut it. Running after her,he thought first in all confusion that she'd gone after Edgar but he saw her round the house to the back and knew she was going up the hill. Her speed was always a wonder,but never more than when she was plagued;she very well could outrun the devil.

The early light had a fantastic quality to it flowing as it did between banks of cloud torn by the wind so the landscape was deceptive beneath it, changing shadows for solid things on a whim. When he was sure of closing in on her it was only a bit of brush , when he thought she waited it was only a cropping of limestone. When he did see her skimming surefooted across the green, he would loose her too quickly in the shift of the sky plunging the mountain into obscurity, and find her in the retreat of gloom again at an impossible distance.

He caught up with her at last on Penniston crag and it seemed she would not stop even there,but run to the end of the county, had she not cut her foot on a stone. So compromised she lost momentum and he caught her. If his fury was not spent in the run, hers was fortified by it. She turned on him, delivering a blow which blinded him momentarily, and when he did not relinquish his grip,another across the mouth,drawing blood.

''Beat me to death if you will then but you will answer me. What have you done,what lie have you told me?''

''What difference does it make? You've ruined everything. could you not for even one hour restrain your arrogance?''

'' And what would I have found _then _Cathy? Why did he call you his wife, after you told me with a straight face you had promised him nothing?''

'' Oh there's a hypocrite! you run off leaving me to die and come back with enough lies to overflow the sea and have the impudence to demand that _I _come clean. To think I'd be free of you both if Ellen had just let me throw myself out the window. ''

''Save your bathos for someone less versed in it. I've been tried too many times.''

''When Have I ever hurt you you ungrateful wretch? Everything I have ever done was only with you in mind,but you are too stupid and dishonorable to see it. After today I can't think of any torment in the universe worse than standing between the two of you,for you are precisely the same now.''

''You never minded it before,why the change of heart? Is the idea of two husbands too much even for your lunacy?''

''Blockhead! For all I know _you_ might have a dozen wives, a harem on every continent. That goes along way in explaining things.''

''Now you are just being vulgar,but it won't distract me. You are a master sophist, _I_ am only your fumbling apprentice. Enlighten me then! Tell me why even now I am turned out to the shadows in preference to that _merkin-''_

She blanched at this grotesquery, recognizing less the spirit of it than the readiness of it.

Drawing her knees up, she hid her face until she had somewhat restored herself. He did not fear she would run again, for exhaustion and the exertion of rage had beat them both.

She resumed,subdued but nerveless still

'' Heathcliff he is not.. my _husband. _I have his ring in my pocket,which I would have had back to him had you not not blundered in; but if it appeases you it is gone as easy as this and with it my attachment''

She pulled from her pocket a bit of coruscation. It shone in the air for an instant, then becoming distant golden music against the steep rocks,disappeared forever.

''And there is the end of it all of it. _Everything I have ever done has been for you.'' _

_''_You left me too,no eloquence can convince my heart of the benefit there.''

''But the benefit there was _only _yours.''

"What can you mean by that. You sent me away Cathy with your words and by your own wish. I would not have thought of it otherwise."

Pressing her palms to her forehead, bewildered and unstrung, she pleaded as if to herself;

"What did I say, what oh what that I cannot remember?"

He seized her by the arms as if by doing so he could drag them both bodily out of the torturous reverie

"You do not recall considering that I was too low to marry you?"

"Why can wicked foolish people be banished to hell and forgotten but not wicked words.. Is that all you heard before you ran off into the night like a thief?"

"Should I have stayed for the rest and been annihilated right there?"

"You are faithless."

"Tell me how so. Did you not speak the truth as you felt it?."

"I did but you never heard me.''

"Tell me now then. Did you not love him?

''What do you mean by love? He was kind to me, What would you have given for a little kindness once?''

He laughed, despite his anger, but she did not rebuke him

"My love, just how much do you think I am willing to endure? Do you expect me to believe for an instant you turned me out for such a stupid thing. Kindness! Did you love him, did you tell him so?''

''I loved him then! I loved as others love, with reason and _reasons,_ with temperance, I don't know! But, I did not tell him as much. How would I?"

''Reasons? What reasons. I hardly understand you.."

"_For my Love which reason knows not._"

She sighed,offering no elaboration and turning away from him again into her own thoughts; He felt sorry at once for his harshness, his braying, and wished she would speak, and be light again, for he could not; but her silence was decisive. Though beset by the last, a warm wind like a breath of peace had stolen across the plain and climbed the hills, and playing around them in the balmy morning seemed to chide them for their sullenness.


	14. Invocation

They did not return home until early evening, for the low soft south breezes had prevailed after the opposing bluster of the morning, and worn through and through they'd fallen asleep. On waking she said her foot was very sore and made a plaster for it out of comfrey, tying it with her scarf. Still she could not walk without distress, so he carried her on his back for a good deal of the way, and they closed the two miles just before dark.

They spoke very little through dinner and were for once grateful for Ellen's distractions, complaining as she redressed Catherine's foot, and kept a furtive eye on the swelling bruise across Heathcliff's eye that neither of them would see out the two weeks until the wedding. Hareton's endless prattle too was a cheerful purgative for the dreadful echoes still ringing through the walls. But after Ellen and Hareton were gone to bed, a strange melancholy waiting in the shadows gathered its cloud over them. They sat in the parlor a long while each in their separate sphere, Catherine attempting to amuse herself by teaching the dog tricks, and teasing the ill tempered creature when it did not show promise, and Heathcliff drawing from the neglected guitar some elusive inspiration. He conjured a dozen songs, so absently dreaming them with his mind elsewhere that they seemed not his own but the broken harmonies of a lost world. Still he kept at it until the chords bore some semblance to his own thoughts.

The dog was reprieved when Catherine, with a weary gesture took up a more insular occupation, picking flora, bits of grass and burrs from the weave of her dress with one hand while she leant her head on the other, singing very softly;

''Tis bonny bonny summer time and all

Abloom

With none so pretty

And columbine

Nodding over the rill

And if I should call my heart

From his far door

Fain he would come

But my hall is dark, too narrow is my bed

So high_ this_ garden wall

I'll sleep alone

Forever with roses

And rosemary at my head

Forgetting his incogitant playing he Looked to her only meaning to ask what the song was, but perhaps some bad spirit from the morning was still present in his demeanor, for she met his gaze abashed and fell silent. It seemed a very long while to Heathcliff, to be mutually dumbstruck. He longed to say anything, but there was not fit one word, however he turned it over in his mind.

At last she excused herself for bed, so quietly he hardly heard. She did not approach him, but only made her way to the stairs with a sigh that somehow was too like the tune of the mournful song she'd been singing ,and for the first time in their lives he thought she was truly sorry for something.

''Cathy..''

She did not answer or turn back but only stood at the balustrade, studying him over her shoulder.

'' Should you not stay off that foot a while longer?

''It's not so bad'' she murmured and started up towards the darkness,

''Worse nursed in such poor humor, don't you think? But you shall persevere no matter.''

It would have been enough in the way of penance to offer her an arm, but it seemed less advantageous hearkening back to his first ideas of the day; He shouldered her as he had before, and it was enough to deliver them from exile.

The silence followed far into the night. Laying side by side on the state bed, which once had belonged to Catherine's Father and mother while _they_ were still stardust, they remained as distant in their own meditations. Heathcliff, fixing on the sky visible above the board at the broken window noted with some indistinct longing , the keen brilliance of it. Had they been out it would have been possible to see by the moon every landmark in mad detail, runes only they understood. As it was he settled for the strange quiet pictures wrought along the walls: the trees bending to the wind, and the thin fleece of clouds passing now and then making the room like a magic lantern. It was not until the clock struck eleven, breaking the reverie with its dull wooden tolling, that Cathy was moved to speak, knowing without benefit of distraction she must leave soon.

She kissed him lightly as in parting but did not go, instead leaning on one elbow and gazing down at him in vague consternation. She touched the bruises on his face which had spread to an even purple across his cheek. It was not the press of her fingers, light as a moth's wing, but the dissonance still hot beneath them, still ringing in his head, which made him flinch. He seized her fingers in his and squeezed them until he felt the small bones yield. The cold light caught a tear, and then another sliding down her cheek faster than she could wipe them away, then with a great sigh which made her frame shiver they were gone, the remainder obliterated on her sleeve.

''Should I not put a poultice on that? It will be worse yet by morning I think.''

''Does it alarm you? Look on it and weep all night then for all I care.''

''I won't. It makes you look rather Moorish that's all.''

''I shall _be _a moor then.''

''Who are you anyhow? How would _I _know? Though I will tell you, today half asleep on the mountain, when I only _felt,_ the grass bristling underneath me, the wind surging over me and the sun's rays all through my hair, and each occasion was as a desire answered, do you know what the greatest of those was? I thought I lay against the bole of a strong tree; I felt the roots of it winding round me, and I was beside myself with joy to be one with it, even if it might draw me down into the earth. But, it did not. It was you, those branches and roots drawing away.

''I was not so near.''

''You _were, _but I suppose you remembered you were angry with me. Oh I dread the waking hour when we must abide by reason once more and forsake the wisdom of our senses.

''If I were ever such a thing to you, do you think I would be discouraged by those paltry annoyances? I take counsel with my senses at all times Cathy, notwithstanding whims of conscience.''

''What then? Why are you so changed? I cannot guess what the catalyst has been.''

''I am more myself than I ever was. That should answer all, if you thought on it awhile.''

''That is no answer, and would be less and less the more I pursued it!

Bending over her as quickly as something pinning its prey, he held her fast to the bed, relishing for one instant the surprise and the might in her resistance. In her wide gaze he saw himself, andthe absurd resolution of a maniac. However, she was not afraid, but altogether mutinous.

''Recall, not a fortnight ago when you tricked me and left me in that room yonder. You were not much afraid then were you? At least you asserted it. But do you not think, as you know me, as you knew me once, that I could absolutely dismantle _you _on a whim?'' She pushed at him with all her strength, and fighting with her was something close to grappling with an oak brought to life by terrible magic. He held her though, until she was still again.

''And it is only because you are too vain. The world does not rise above your head or continue beyond the length of your arm. Shall I tell you what the catalyst was? It was only to find the selfsame fault, and a thousand days of torture. Thankless hours to realize the sun still rises and sets endlessly despite me, and with nothing to shine on.'' But I think you will not understand no matter what I say.

''Leaving as you did- you could not make me afraid of anything now! You speak in rhymes of things that _were_, and things that _are not. _Tomorrow is a wretched lie just as sure as yesterday is dead. I have learned that and have only to do with now. Tell me how it is wrong or be done with it.''

She faltered, and it seemed she was yet closer to to priceless tears, and he knew what he would do to answer, though if his own perspicacity was inordinate all would gloriously annihilated.

''Kiss me then.''

''Now? I'd just as soon taste venom!''

''Do as I say, and be very still. I shall give you _now _if now is all you wish.''

He watched her for a minute, fitful thoughts coloring her features, and giving way to resignation, though the shadow remained at her brow, loury as the first breath of December. As she did not oblige him, but only continued to stare up with that bleak, flinty countenance, he applied himself instead. She was not exactly yielding, and if she would not be it was naturally impossible to carry through as intended, but instead make of himself a blundering Lothario. Wearing that fool's skin, he'd rather have died in it. His spurious endearments landed where they would, for she turned her head each time he attempted it, and cried 'Bah. I shall not be bitten by you! Take yourself and your poison arrows off, traitor.''

''Nonsense. You shall not harass me again.''

'' My prospects grow sadder by the minute.''

She peered at him through the dark, as if she were not entirely confident a being of flesh and blood were above her, and when she was so unguarded he apprehended as he had meant to all along with the most ghastly of kisses. Leastwise, to him they were so, for no affection whatsoever was forecast through them, though imparted with artful softness. Having hardly an inclination to respond to command or insult she attempted once more to disengage herself from his possession, but he retained her on peril of renewed invention. Through a series of small recollections which he drew up as carefully as a weaver moves his thread, or a painter chooses his colors, he ascended a precipice. Though it advanced even as he scaled it, it could scarcely contain behind its might an equally black and terrible sea threatening to overreach it. What were these recollections but the great miseries of his existence, each in its turn countervailed by the sympathy of another's. He understood in his fathomless love for her, most recently fantastic with desire, the possibility of mutual annihilation. Each remembrance with her yet so close kindled a bewitching terror he could never put to words.

She moved but a little beneath him now, having followed almost unconsciously each breath which drew him deeper into his own calculated stillness. She stirred once to raise her arms about his neck, and was vetoed so emphatically she did not venture afterwards a single twitch. Not that she would obey, but between the little caresses that fell across her cheek from his like the balmy wing of April, and his voice so steeled passing her ear , she had begun to know the first dark spines of fear creeping up through her heart; the thin grasping extremities of a vast formless horror. He knew by now she must feel within herself the prescience of the great abysmal sea, a starless chaos swelling against the battlements of his wall, swallowing everything in its wake. That she would not guess the origins of this maelstrom was no matter, that she would not know it was but the black fulmination of the mirrored grey green tides that had first taken him far from her. She felt as sure as him, the smallest stones giving way and the great wall, with its summit nearly out of sight groaning with the weight of the storm beating against it. She listened with her whole body, her whole consciousness leaning in towards the great deafening bluster as if she could hold it asunder with only that. She trembled with the effort, though scarcely aware of it, but he knew how much she felt. Her heart beat so painfully against his it seemed they might shatter each other.

A senseless liberation overtook him despite his fear, and so he was more brazen than wise. It was only a moment that seemed to stretch interminably, perhaps something of what the condemned feel hearing the gallows creak beneath their weight; a moment of clarity, unfeeling yet knowing acutely the universe, heaven or hell approaching. Turning from his labor he knew for a moment, only _her. _A thousand myriad details that together described his soul; and this warm tangle of flesh, and the heady, damp sweetness of it was no more or less than that. He balanced his weakness against her fear perhaps too recklessly, but then these perversities of the mind and spirit had been his delight since childhood. Her body, bonny, splendid, radiant prisoner, perceiving itself only through the body of its oppressor, came around in the abject spell to a dreadful sort of ecstasy for an instant only, and then with the might of Samson she pushed her way free. She leapt away from him bounding halfway across the room before stopping, and he fell back against the bed shaken by a gale of laughter that seemed intent on dismantling him and escaping the bounds of the room. But it was relief, not arrogance.

As he tried to quell a little his absurd mirth, she approached again cautiously, as if he were some loathsome half killed serpent. Her cheeks were crimson, an agitation that always made her eyes as bright and hard as diamonds, and her forehead was damp. A flush of mottled rose spread over her breast, till the ivory of her gown glowed against it, and the knuckles of her hands clenched against the desire for revenge, just as white. This florid picture recalled to him a long ago time, some lost day among a million others where she had called him out. He felt in the weight of it, an overwhelming regard for her, and forgiveness toward the world which had kept her while he roamed the earth.

'' I hate you!'' She inched closer, ''Do you hear me Heathcliff? Where have you learned such wicked things? A legion of demons and witches could not conjure such madness!''

''Were you not forewarned then? Did I not give you ample opportunity to avoid me?''

He had hard work to suppress his laughter further, for her expression, some odd commingling of vehemence and curiosity as she drew closer, was heartening as it was frightful.

''You were right to guess I kept company with shamans and islanders, all kindred to me. How else do you think I was able to vanish in a storm, and bring myself back so suddenly if not for the aid of the black arts? But do come back and I will make it up. I have been heartless.''

''You are made of wickedness! And I shall not come near you for fear of my soul.''

He came closer to her, and she did not move.

''So you will not be my wife then, my love in true? And I shall be compelled to seek out of the shadows, some gilded mistress?''

'' Please yourself then. No doubt you have-''

He reached for her before she could step away, snatching away her impossible distance so they fell back on the cushions in a hot heap. She did not fight but neither would she look at him. She lay still as sleep in his grasp.''

''No doubt, I know her well. She is unmatched in the world. Her hair is brown, though not just so, but a dozen peculiar shades of it, the most notable being an amber hue of twilight, so I cannot look up to the sky in the evening without being reminded of her. Her eyes are the same color, only of a later hour, when the first stars are burning there. And she smells of every sweet thing that grows so I cannot walk gods earth without her presence always around me. Everything I have ever done or ever will do is for her love for the moment she does not love me I cease to exist.''

''So you vanished because I did not love you?''

''But How soon did I see the error of that as you came every night to tell me so.''

''So you stayed away then to punish me?''

''Because you wished it.''

''Ah, is that so? Well _I_ remembered while you held me there and I braced myself against such fear, long ago when Hindley beat you, and you did not let me touch you any more. I could not change it though I racked my brains how to, because I felt what were the use of my life..if brutality compelled you to forever repel were the _use _of my existence if only for myself? I spent many a night in sleepless grief wondering at what I must sacrifice, and many a sleepless night since grieving my loss.

He did not want to remember those days, the scars he could not let her see, scripture across his skin which told a tale of bitterness too long. He steered his mind far away from that darkness, turning his back to her and her inquisitions.

''You understand now a little of what I've suffered then. Even your Wretched brother could never inflict that on me. I did not mean to scare you so, but do you see now how it is? I will not lose us again. When our castle is built I will call you home. ''

Shaken, spent as she was she could not keep herself from baiting him.

''We had a castle once, fine enough. It is still waiting out there in the dark if you will go, if you are not _afraid _of me. But I see you are and I shall go to my room and leave you to your cheerless dreams.''

''Oh no you shall not go; I am too tired to let you torture me, and too awake to be alone. Come here again. Tomorrow we will wake up in a new world, for I have something for you that will go a long way in curing us. So dress sharp, we are going riding.''

Again he could feel the darkling drum of her heart against his, the call and answering echo becoming one maddening sound. He heard in it the music of the tireless years ahead, all the nights which would send this one to obscurity, and it was infinite solace.


	15. of always and of nowhere

He felt in his half sleep the way he had in those last days at sea, the dreamy rocking which had no origin, the swells that tied the hours together in a seamless skein of night and day. Cathy had escaped him at some darker hour, and he was glad of it, for he was weak as water in the poignant hours of the morning; but she was not far, the reprobate. She stood before the mirror at the opposite end of the room, in nothing but her crumpled shift and the splendor of her loosened hair, burnished in the first light creeping through top of the window. She accomplished her toilet with calculated disinterest, as if each bit of clothing were some enemy she must bargain with. He watched her, with one eye opened conservatively, so he might keep observing her from this secret vantage point as long as possible.

Though he knew it was deliberate, this taunting reminder of innocent days, he felt the sin of taking such a liberty; though how many a man, he mused, has lain with a woman, married her, spent a lifetime next to her in sleep and love, while she brought forth his children, slaved over his meals and bent under his complaints, yet never once availed himself of this dear picture. What husband, witnessing such a brave and poignant struggle, could fail to recognize and be moved by his own heart before him, a moth which must every morning, fold its moon dusted wings back into the dark cocoon. He watched her disappear; her fingers, quick slender shadows fumbling with stays, with a regiment of buttons fastening her into a precipitous disguise of wool and linen. A black ribbon wound through her hair called up Etrurian ghosts in their lost and dark eyed mirth. How unknowingly she shared with them the secrets of a catastrophe. He closed his eyes again, for he could not look so long without being stirred to move near her, to wake and dispel reverie entirely; but she had done well torturing him into consciousness, and he rolled over into the opposing side of the bed to hide from reproach, stifling into his pillow a cry of defeat in the shape of her name.

She came to him, sitting herself on the edge of the couch. He could feel the joy in her, and thought it so splendid a presage to his plans he must not delay any longer; but ere he moved, she leaned and put her arms about him. She kissed him and a diffusion of brilliant heat spread across his face, for without the aegis of night he was helpless to hide such excesses of feeling. She lay alongside him, every aspect in concordance with his own, everywhere they met, his senses appropriated rarely. Each occurrence an affirmation of his existence; The leather of her small boot against his own foot, the abruptness of her knee beneath the formless tumble of her dress, Her heart a beast in its velvet cage. In the certainty of her embrace he couldn't hide. She alone knew his wounds, his loss, the ruts of his scourging, and ever moved by something beyond herself only she could touch them and heal with impunity.

He remembered with some guilt the hour he had moved away from her with his entire being. When her absolutions became an intrusion. What gratification for either of them in the intolerable pity? When she touched him he knew an ecstasy so keen it made him draw in his breath sharply, and something shameful and sweet conquering him in a great suffocating wave. Unable to bear the weakness , he had thereafter repelled her. Recalling this, the hour he understood the depth of his regard for her by the breadth of his grief , he turned to her, his present Cathy; to the gentle uncompromising prison of her arms. Her bright face was so close the fine loose tendrils of her hair teased his eyes; and the deluge revived, was an august tide.

''Well I know now it is not beyond me to please you, though it confounds me as to how to make a life of it. Come now Heathcliff and show me how I will.''

''You have me now at a disadvantage, but after today I will advise you, my love, to step lightly and be very, very wary of crossing me with your tricks again. After the violins and sermons and lace I shall be a madman.

She laughed at his summation of their wedding;

"You've conjured up a funeral. Now you betray your true self!"

"Indeed, and you might still escape. Already I am losing my patience, so go downstairs and bother Ellen to find us something to eat, and then get your horse ready. Unless you wish to walk all day, and on that foot I don't advise it."

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It was not more than an hour later and they were long past the Heights. Watching the sun ascend with such promise, they felt no compulsion to rush headlong into the day. When she at last asked where on earth were they going he only shrugged. In good time he saw the change in her, memory alive in her whole frame, a tenderness in her eyes for things past. At the road, where they had so often seen the woman drifting along in the high fields, she stopped. Gazing long at the draggled vista, the stunted laurel, and maple, springs late offerings of agrimony and violet, heather and broom, all a golden blush in the morning light, she sighed, all her life in one fragrant breath from there.

''Heathcliff, it seems like a century since we played here. Do you think if we waited long enough we might see _her_ again?

He felt a chill remembering that frail shadow crossing the bright meadow like a cloud. The uneasy sense of familiarity as if she were a ghost in a dream he knew but could not name.

''I think she has long gone to somewhere better..''

''How do you know.. have you been here since?''

''Maybe..I've been so many places, I might really go insane trying to remember them all, only ride a little further with me and perhaps it will put my mind in order.''

''Don't tease. It is too sweet of a morning to be spoiled by your despotism. I want to linger here for a little while anyhow, while the flowers are still dreaming.''

''Dreaming? Your garden is virtually stupefied. I should think the flowers far more appealing after the noon sun has warmed the scent from them''

But she'd already dismounted her horse, and was far into the topaz haze before he'd disengaged from his and could follow. She went to and fro, preferring the low things that grew, to the bright things that nodded just at her fingertips as if vying for the honor of her attention. She'd a modest armful by the time he reached her, a wild uprising of color against her dark coat.

''Look here Heathcliff. Everything blooms earlier here because it is warmer. Over near that tree I found asphodel."

"A strange flower."

"It appeases the dead. I have laid it often on fathers grave and on the banks of the marsh when I thought you were there."

"An appropriate pittance I suppose."

And among pansies and bee balm, these '' and here she held up a tangle of purple. '' They are only dog violets. I remember that Ellen would throw them out and call them weeds, but I rescued them behind her back and put them in the window of my room. They are lowly little things, but aren't they hearty and beautiful, and worth all the admiration of a rose? ''

She glanced up at him, so quickly from her flowers it seemed their purple hue was still in her eyes as they met his, and his soul was at once so full of that strange color.

''What? What is it Heathcliff-Why do you look so odd?''

''I've done wrong by you, and you are right to be wary of me. I fear I petitioned you in haste for selfish reasons, and only made a fool of myself in turn ,but I wish to make amends this morning if you will let me''

''Oh what could this new turn of character be! Do not be gloomy, but tell me plainly what you mean.''

''Will you disregard all my actions heretofore, as those of a 'stupid boy' as you called me? I will explain myself better in time, but for now, if you forgive me come to me without suspicion, and answer again if you will marry me.''

She turned her eyes toward heaven then, as if the explanation for his current lunacy were to be found there.

''Heathcliff, A thousand times if you asked me, a thousand times I would answer yes! I care not what you say to me, but that you are here to say it; and yet two weeks seems such a cruel injustice."

''Here is my purpose then. We shall be married this afternoon, and be free by tonight. I have much to tell you, and I feel now it can hardly wait another hour. Is it well with you, or shall we go on indefinitely?''

"This afternoon! How will that be accomplished? It is impossible without a license and we've not set foot in church in so many years, even to say we've been seen. And who will give consent? I am seventeen yet, and you only eighteen. I had hardly even considered that. It is hopeless to that end."

"Do you imagine I would have troubled you over it if I had not already worked it out, at least in my head. Anything is possible, if a few people will look the other way."

"A pagan marriage! Splendid. And what if we are called on it one day?"

"Such is the fate of imbeciles, swindlers of hearts and deviants. Time is a blind old fool for true love. It holds its own. I believe that.''

"Nothing you say makes any sense, however I know you to be uncommonly clever, determined and intuitive, so I will acquiesce to it on those principles, and hope I am justified.''

"So does that mean you will ? You will have me by whatever means it takes, accepting all consequences whether real or imagined?"

In answer she seized him and shook him, so violently heedless of her little flowers, they scattered on the hazy landscape like colored stars.

'' How will I live all my days with such madness? I shall soon not know myself at all, delighting as well in aimless torture. Heathcliff are you satisfied now that I am wrung out? We could have been married a month since!''

''We could have been so two years ago.''

''Ah, don't! Don't twist my heart so when it is helpless to resist! And with false hood besides..You deceived me too.''

She knelt on the ground with pretense of resurrecting her bouquet, but scarcely concealing the terrible excess of feeling which ran riot through her complexion, she found solace in absurd deliberation. He rejoined her silence with his, among her flowered occupations, kissing her cold, pale cheek and the abundance of warmer curls blown by an errant gust.

''Enough then. If I have deceived you it was for your own sake. But come away with me now for I have something that might make you forget those sorrowful little posies under your boot.''

It almost seemed, as they approached the road to the house, that she had forgotten it completely. But his mind, not corresponding to hers just then could not fathom the subtle changes which might have made the landscape foreign to her. When at recognition came at last, it was not with delight, but a fearful qualm.

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''Heathcliff, it is the house, the very place we made home.. But it is well occupied! Look at the yard, and freshness all about, they must be home this very hour. We should not go any further.''

He ordered his horse to the gate, but Cathy held back , stricken.

''Since when are you averse to trespassing? If I said I was intimately acquainted with the tenants here would you be game , or less willing yet?''

''Acquainted, how so?''

''I will not shout it to you. Bring your horse round to the gate if you are curious.''

She came slowly forward, and cautiously from her saddle touched ground again, but held the reigns as if ready at any moment to bolt back up and away again.

''Come then, it is a quarter mile path if you remember. We shall go like old times if you wish, sneaking from tree to tree like bandits; but mind the shade, and keep your shoes out of the mud.''

He'd only been able to imagine this scene within a limited frame. Assembling it with the available pieces of experience and expectation. However, he had not anticipated in the least his own reaction. While working on the house he'd felt little more than indifference toward it, never truly connecting it to anything tangible. It was simply a means to an end. He'd not realized until now how much of his soul, little by little had been invested in it. For every day spent here was a day apart from her , a day only to think of her in the busy solitude. So as they stood on the walkway he knew a strange euphoria; his heart was pounding, and his fingers could not find the key in his pocket. _She _was astonished, and slightly mystified at the sight of, her beloved ruin rising like a castle reborn. After a long silence where the only sound was the wind laughing at them, Cathy spoke, incredulous.

"Well, should we not knock, or call out? Or is there some other way a guest announces himself here?"

"A guest?''

Drawn out from his paroxysm, he secured the key and opened the door. He scarcely registered her surprise, until he turned about to see she was still standing outside.

"Well, come forward and find out what crime I have committed."

She came hesitantly, defiant not knowing what trick he would trip her up with, until she stood, amazed in the center of the great parlor.

''Heathcliff, what are you up to? Who lives here?"

"Who indeed!"

"_Have_ you committed some crime?."

"I have, and all for you. Your love has made me an outlaw. Pirate, highwayman, gambler, heretic, turncoat, swindler--"

"All those? and this is-"

"This is yours.''

Baffled, she stepped back from him. He remained where she left him, his hand on his chin.

"What.. I don't understand."

"You asked who lives here. There, look."

He pointed to the far end of the room where a wide mirror hung from floor to ceiling. She moved toward it as if it were a body of water, an uncertainty, until she came abreast of her own perplexed person. He stood next to her, and there they were, two handsome figures in black, stark against an ivory universe.

"There before you is the master, a Mr Heathcliff, a curious name no doubt, but he has labored long to bring dignity to it, and there beside him is the mistress of the house, Lady Heathcliff; Catherine if you will. I'd tread softly around her, for gossip says she's a real fury. But you see, there is no accounting for love. He has a mad notion to buy her the world, this being the first thing he saw he seized it up; but if it displeases her in any way or she should think of it as prison he would take mallets and levers to it today. "

"That is an unaccountable love indeed -such senseless waste...''

She turned to him, disbelieving; she looked down, trying make sense of her own thoughts, and back up with guarded wonder.

"Do you mean,honestly, this belongs to you now?

"To you, if you will have it."

Saying nothing else, she turned to wander about the perimeters of the enormous parlor, as one acclimating to a vivid dream. She took all in with the greatest reverence. As he watched her, moving from window to window, corner to corner her changeable nature was almost painfully evident. It was too plain on her face that her heart knew not what to make of the strangeness, the fresh brilliance of a new world superimposed on the dearness of an old one. The splendid trappings, velvet and crystal and ivory, displacing a Gypsies paradise of polished wood and ragged lace. At last she fell back with a great defeated sigh, into a couch of blue damask. Pale winter blue roses, more roses and vines, and she in her black riding habit looked so austere, sober, and prophetic against the frivolity of it he thought for an instant not only had he made a mistake, but a much graver than he could have imagined. However, sitting himself by her with the same deflating sigh, he received for his anxiety the sweetest smile,and how blessed he was in the light of that peerless beauty.

"So, what will it be. Will you take it as a gift, or shall I set ablaze?''

''Let me think. First I will have to imagine for myself the means by which you secured it. I shouldn't find myself complacent in any more of your double dealings than I already have. And how did you engage a crew to do such an amount of work without the whole village knowing about it?"

''I engaged no one, except a painter who's gone back home now with my secrets. It is all my work. Every moment I have spent away from you this month a labor converted.''

Never did a change come over a prophet in the forest ,as came over her then. She regarded him with wide eyed deference, and then taking his hands in hers touched his palms, spreading his fingers out beneath her own. Old scars, callouses worn smooth. The natural lines, which formed her initials; C curving from the first, to just above the the wrist, and the E, turned about, askew;and Connecting the letters a small line, which made an H of their opposing sides. Laced across this dear, familiar scape was a newer map; cuts and ridges, wales and scratches, not the seeming of a gentleman, but the augury of true fortune. Her love, unchanged, unspoiled.

"Heathcliff your hands, how they weep! What a tale they tell."

"And the end of the tale, how will that be?''

At once, radiant and inspired she rose and took him with her in a dance.

"No end, my love, _no_ end. Heaven help us. Come now Heathcliff and show me everything!"

They lingered far into the golden hour of noon, for she had him recount with every station, his ideas, his reasons and his hopes and failures in each endeavor. She was particularly entranced with the garden, although in truth it had not reached its potential. The little arbor still anticipated its roses and grapes, and except for a few fruit trees, bushes, plots of lilies, orchids, and the straggling eglantine, the earth was bare. It only waited for his lady's vision. In the courtyard he installed a marble statue of Clytie, kneeling with her face to the sun; an echo of figures he had seen in Rome. Initially he was unhappy with her; a stupid indulgence, which, compared to those supplicating, contorted illusions of the duomos and the grand palaces, had little to arrest the eye. However, in four weeks time, a bramble vine he had cleared from the cracked tiles below grew back and found purchase there. Vengeful for the insult, it seemed to be intent on swallowing her. So Heathcliff grudgingly found a reason to admire her. But he tended to forget that Cathy was not so jaded , and still might find the novelty in anything. She stood for a long while in front of the figure, her gaze tracing over and over the outstretched arms, the upturned face in its blind rapture, the delicate fingers and feet half transformed into flowers. Caressing the cool marble, heedless of the deadly thorns, she seemed to find a kinship there. Longing to know what she felt, the thoughts which defied the shape of words, he touched her hand as it was, flowing, convergent with each curve and hollow. Whatever happened after, whatever memories jostled the ages for their own permanent glory, the resplendence of _this_ hour was indelible. How she leaned back on his shoulder, unaware, and the wonder she knew, the exquisite sorcery in such perfection was the same in himself. Never had he known such an exaltation in discovery, and he made up his mind then to free Clytie, and put her in the garden among the beneficence and softness of her kind.

She also spent equal, though not quite as enraptured, consideration on the painted illusion of the parlor walls, asking where he had encountered such a panorama, columns and gardens and courtyards, the likes of which she had never seen. He lied and said he had not, that it was the painters memory, not his, though he knew those scapes just as well as he knew his own face.

So they were happy for an hour or two, running from room to room; to the servants quarters and the back with its cavernous kitchen, the library, and other anterooms which seemed to have no purpose at all, until Cathy halted at the foot of the stairs in surprise, as if the loftier regions of the house had occurred to her only just. They never ventured up there as children, leaving it to whatever ghosts chose to inhabit it. The shriek of the first step, when they tested it, was enough to keep curiosity at bay. Repaired now, and silenced the egress was no more inviting than it had been before. Perhaps because the architecture was a remnant from an earlier, darker time; black oak carved to catch every shadow in blacker pools, and a very narrow walk which would scarcely fit two people side by side, seeming disproportionate to the height it ascended. Altogether this gave it the rickety appearance, though it was solidly built, of an arduous limbo connecting two bright plains. After a brief contemplation she started to go up, but with sudden purpose, he arrested her ascent, and she turned to him like one jolted from a spell. He could not begin to imagine the way either of them might feel, or reason standing together in the bower doorway of the bridal apartment, with its heaven blue and polish, the molten sunlight of late-noon like honey across its quiet walls. Though it was uncomplicated and spare he had worked more passionately on that space than any other. Even going so far as to discover what effects different stages of its particular light had on dreams. She would know these things instinctively, without need in the least of his elaboration as in the rest of the house. It was only while working on that room, and in the garden that he could imagine a life here.

"What is it Heathcliff? Is our lady of the harebells still lingering by her window?"

"God forbid. I'm sure I swept her out with the dust.''

"Then why do you hold us here?"

" I will ask you, having never gone up there before , shouldn't we approach it with as much reverence as we can command? "

"Reverence being?....."

"Reverence being, one name one life."

"Ah, such is obeisance to the law, what law I hardly know now;but I accept your terms, and your gift with all humility."

She stood against the wall then, resigned to defeat; but there was high color in her face. Kissing her cheek he tasted sunlight, fortune, faith, mercy and grace. God could not condemn such a union by any means. She was a always a spark in those moments. Returning affection she was so bold, perhaps believing in the sanctity of the final hour; but her mouth was too warm and too soft. In what dream had she learned to kiss like that? Butterflies and flowers, sleep in the sun, madness. He hadn't realized how he had pressed her until he felt the rise and fall of her breathing against his, their bodies meeting exactly. He recovered with a sigh, putting his fingers to her lips, but even the softness there was ridiculously tantalizing.

"A few more hours. Only a few more hours. In the dark here no one will know us, like old days, just you and I. I defy any law of man or God to condemn us then.

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It was near five o'clock when they at last departed. He knew exactly where they were going and it was a two and a half hour ride at a fast pace, westward, away from the Heights. They had no way to tell Ellen, though they had intended for her to be their sole witness. It seemed like a necessary treachery though, for she would be horrified. Heathcliff would not concede that the pastor was a complete fraud, had he been, he would never have entrusted such a solemn occasion to him. Only, in charge of a straggling increasingly disenchanted parish, the old man was far less inclined to see bribery as an affront to God than a means to secure his glory. No one had ever had the opportunity to wonder how such a fine chapel with two tall windows of colored glass arose in the wilderness; and those parishioners arrested from their wanderings were feign to speculate, being often the beneficiaries of the good pastors generosity. The new widow whose crop failed, who had no one to collect peat for the fire or tend the sheep, taken care of for the year until she either married again or learned to do for herself. To the man whose wife was ill with consumption, a doctor and someone to tend the house and nurse the children. If people were foolish, or headstrong it was reasonable to believe that their failings [ especially if these failings involved the moneyed and the respected] acted in accord with the misfortune of blameless others to create an understandable balance in the world. So he performed, for a negotiable fee [and he did his book work meticulously and knew who was most negotiable.] At least two marriages a week, plus numerous absolutions, of both the living and the dead. The Lord received his tithing regardless. Heathcliff had come across the pastors kindness himself two and half years earlier, torn by the violence of the sky and near death. He never knew whether to curse the old man to hell, or repay him. Tonight he was in a mood to repay him generously. He'd give half his fortune and be glad being so unburdened.

The day had been so long already, and when it was over they would have the whole way to ride back. He thought it would do them much good to stop and rest for a long while, but Catherine wanted to go on, saying they had the whole rest of their lives to be indolent. So they continued and in time, as will happen with the very young, the shadow of weariness simply fled, and they both felt as new as they had in the morning. By six thirty they had reached the crossroads that turned south toward Gimmerton or kept west , when they saw, in the waning light, someone coming up the road. Their fellow traveler was riding in a carriage drawn by two white horses . They stopped and waited for the entourage to pass, and as it drew nearer, he recognized, almost before Cathy, who the conveyance belonged to. It did not pass. The driver halted. He thought to go on and ignore it, but Edgar Linton sprung from the coach with such purpose, Heathcliff imagined he might throw himself in front of their horses if they moved. Besides his blood was up already, and while once he would have lived and died to see Edgar trampled, the idea of making a fool out of him was far more appealing. Especially since he'd done half the work himself.


	16. Crossroad

He stood so long near his carriage, one hand resting on the door; it appeared that he had forgotten himself. He did not address either of them immediately, but looking up once or twice seemed to fix on something between them and distant. When at last he spoke his voice was thick as if he'd been drugged, and approaching them he stumbled over a few small pebbles in the road. His aspect however, belied his odd demeanor; Heathcliff received a distinct impression that, rather than being sloughy with defeat and ale he was pacified, so much so that it had restored the originality of youth to him. Rather than the pale powdered tailor's dummy from before he appeared sanguine, as if he'd been at some vigorous curative occupation. His clothes were dusted with the road, and his hat was clutched and folded in his hand. With him were his hounds, three vespine creatures he let loose to slink around the edges of the road and the legs of the horses. The little mare, Surabi which Heathcliff had just recently began taking out on longer trips balked at this, and it was all he could do to keep her still. Cathy, in the meantime removed herself and her own horse to a safe distance.

"Mr. Heathcliff what a coincidence we should meet here"

He glanced up as he spoke, wincing against the sting of a phantom sun.

"An unfortunate confluence, what do you want anyhow?"

"Do you not think it an unlikely hour for such an excursion, since there is nothing in that direction for ten miles on? To be on a robber's road near dark, and with a young lady hardly seems wise. However, that being said, you might be more familiar with the territory than myself."

Heathcliff, having braced himself at Edgars advance now relaxed, for there was such puerile animation in the challenge he seemed hardly worthy of more than momentary derision. Anger left him for agitation. Making to lead his horse around him if he would not move, he added in passing,

"Shouldn't you be getting home before you are seized by a fever?"

Abraded, he drew himself up to his full height, and what he said next struck Heathcliff as so odd he could not well depart without puzzling it out first. Though it went far in explaining his ridiculous display of confidence, Heathcliff knew that upon their first encounter in April he had been an apprentice only, no more than a clerk still at his studies, and now he boasted the full power of authority with the self-assurance of one fully prepared to execute an order. If he were bluffing it was only with the influence of a singular delusion.

"Must I remind you who you are speaking to sir? I am a magistrate, and I would advise you to respect it as far as you are able."

"Have I been charged with some offense? If so, show proof, if not have done with it and take yourself and your nonsense out of my way."

Emboldened by the vocal manifestation of his own importance, Edgar stepped into the path, intentionally blocking his rivals egress, and either this abrupt direction or something else troublesome in his demeanor set the horse to pull with renewed energy against her reigns. When Heathcliff did not release her she showed further distress, heaving back and showing the whites of her eyes. Edgar stepped back, with more suspicion than surprise.

"It is your dogs; she is not used to them underfoot. My horse hasn't the patience for insipid annoyances that I do, so again I would admonish you to step aside, after all a ravening dog let loose is a fearsome thing, but the vigor of a mad horse is another matter entirely."

"I believe that was a threat sir, was it not? I could hold you accountable for that by law, however that is an issue with your character which is not my concern, nor in my power to effect. I have just come from Wuthering heights where I have been informed of your-"

Here he stopped, the next words caught in his windpipe like batting , and it was only with a good deal of effort and the quelling of something like an oncoming fit that he managed at last to pant them out.

"Of your intention to marry Catherine, I must assume from previous evidence that it is true?"

"Assume what you will, but you only debase yourself with this interrogation. Ask her yourself if you wish so to ease your curiosity."

Surabi had by now, made herself unmanageable and Heathcliff with enough to do in keeping the creature in hand was disregarding the inquisitor with even more contempt. He saw Cathy wandering yet farther away to a copse of lonely ash trees, where she set to comforting her own horse, stroking its nose and giving it water from her hand. When that was done she sat down in the deeper shade, holding her hands at her head, as if by the effort she would not only block out sound, but action.

"Very well then"

Once more there was an incongruous shift in Edger's demeanor, signifying an embarrassment of ideas or motive; while at once presenting authority in subject, it revealed all the more penury and despair of conviction in tone. He may well have been a hawker weary of his own questionable goods. He continued nevertheless with his arid delivery.

"Aside from my great disappointment in Miss Earnshaw, letting herself and her family be taken in by a knave, as I have said I have a duty to uphold the law in every detail. I am informing you now that under the canon of England your _marriage _is forbidden-"

Heathcliff, having heretofore proved capable of more restraint than he dared credit himself, now felt himself moving forward without deliberation, but Edgar, distinguishing with the same promptness how smartly he had hit his mark, gathered himself up, with the aspect of those petrified trees which, while appearing as pliable living things have turned to stone and have neither sap nor water to animate them.

"You were raised in the same house, were you not, by the same parents? This fact declares you to be legally brother and sister. Furthermore it is documented in the papers of Catherine's father; he wished you, as a _son_ to have a share of his property upon his death-equally with that of Catherine's brother. Hence, no one would credit such a union regardless of whether or not you can prove Mr. Earnshaw's request was honored. But I see you will not believe me, so have a look for yourself."

Brandishing a stack of yellowed papers he squared his chin; he might have resembled with his arm raised, the Augustus bronze had a sudden and contentious squall not sent his slight frame trembling like a sail, and the documents rattling together in his hand like dried fronds. Heathcliff did not take them, only staring as they fluttered before him, a loathsome prophecy. Nevertheless, there happened an instant of miscalculation wherein the insensible movement of one man was assumed by the other as the intent to seize violently either the articles themselves, or their bearer. As a result the papers were flung spasmodically at the unwilling beneficiary who in turn hurled them thither, while the assailant jumped to safety. This abrupt retreat landed him in the dirt where he floundered for a moment, his face in his hands.

"Bah! What a lass thou art. Are these cheap tricks evidence of the regard and affection you planned to sustain Catherine on? There now, don't quiver like a blade of grass; keep talking, raise your voice again so that she might feel righteous in the choice she _has_ made. And as for your authority, while you might be a virtuoso in your own eyes if you trouble Catherine again or approach her as anything but the most gracious and humble of friends no law in Britain, however cleverly transcribed will keep me from exacting remuneration."

"It's an abomination! You will ruin her, her name, her fortune..."

"I am done with this, Mr. Linton... I'd advise you not to tarry for as you have stated it is a robber's road, and the darkness will be of no service to you."

Heathcliff turned to deliver himself from the scene entirely while Edgar struggled to recover his dignity. Ere he had put any good distance between himself and the useless figure sprawled in the dirt, he caught a glimpse of an ashen little face, with its mouth agape like a cod-fish peering from the shadows of the cab. In the brief glimpse he recognized Isabella Linton, and though he could not reason why, the bewildered countenance made him uneasy. Edgar was soon forgotten amongst his papers, struggling to divest his person of soot, and recover his hat which had been trampled by Surabi. He shouted something unintelligible to the driver, who had climbed down to offer his assistance. Repelled, the man went hastily back to the safety of his bench. After resting for some time against the door of the cab, wherein a few words passed unheard between him and the form within, he vanished into its confines as well, and they were gone as if they had never been at all.

Catherine would not look at him as he came near. She sat still, gazing upwards at the tripudiary of green and gold, a soft mesh heaving across the late sky. A cloud of white summer moths floated about her and a thrush stationed on a low branch, between preening its feathers kept a curious eye on the meditative form. Nothing started as he approached, as if the whole of nature in her vicinity were so rapt with the occupation of brooding study, they had forgotten instinct. Even his pacing, which he adopted for lack of words effected not the rustic vision. When at last he found his voice, it sounded to him amongst the static peace too carping.

"I suppose you think I have done him some harm?"

She did not answer directly, but quietly turning her gaze on him considered him as if he were a specimen, an attendant curiosity of the environs she found herself in now. She came to herself soon enough with agitation;

"I wish that you might beat each-other senseless and leave me in peace! He'll replace his courage now with a detachment and a brace of pistols. You should be quite happy though having proved yourself manually against such a force."

He saw the futility in trying to defend him-self; from her vantage point the transgression was set, and he did not wish to widen the breach between them with foolish assertions.

"You've miscalculated his sense of pride. Do you imagine he'd be that eager to reveal his meddling in someone else's affairs, and expose himself for the jealous fool that he is?"

"Jealous? Heathcliff what business did he have with you?"

"He believes himself possessed of some authority suddenly, and it has gone to his head."

"What do you mean? I cannot bide your riddles at present!"

"I feel I must not speak to you lest you make some hasty judgment against our interests."

"Cease! What a rat you are I should turn you out for inconstancy."

She raised herself, distraught in earnest and made to walk past him. But he caught her skirt. She flung him off and turned back to face him, feverish, her eyes hard as adamantine. However, after considering his anxiety to keep her there might make him honest, she relented.

"Do you recall, Cathy, how we began? Your fathers words when he brought me to you?"

"He wished that we might treat you as a brother. Indeed! Petting you up above the rest of us, yet wishing dearly that we might share equitably all we had."

"Does it please you really, to be so Vindictive? At any rate, that is the contention, he has raked up some obscure vagaries from his law books which he believes will hinder any attempt on our part to be-to become-"

He paused seeking a way to avoid reducing his great love to a profane convention.

"_He_ has the notion that we are by law, brother and sister, and can prove it by some paperwork your father left behind."

For an instant she was stricken, her expression in rictus, as swiftly she gathered her senses,and coolness which left no inroad to anyone or anything striving to regain her soft side by way of any telling turn of Physiognomy.

"And what is that, that has not been annulled entirely by Hindley, or thrown away by you?"

"It is not absolute; only some doubtful contradiction to a legal union, because we were raised under the same roof."

" Pity the dead cannot rise from their graves, my father would thunder at the injustice, to know that before he was even cold in his coffin you were freezing in the stables and I was laid alone-. Oh for the power to turn _him_ out! I would have had years of bliss. How many times did I think to smother him in his wretched sleep-?"

"That you might have spoke your wishes sooner- but don't tempt _me _with ideas of death today, it is too easy and I had hoped we would be glad for an hour or two at least."

"What is there to be glad for christened with such foul averments?-No I shall say nothing further, for heaven mocks me at every turn and I am weary of it."

She turned from him and drifted off to retrieve her horse, which had gone away to sympathize with the other.

Her disregard for him was agonizing, the ten yards she'd put between them not a measure of corporeal distance but the breadth, ever widening, of her sentiments from his own. All of that wilderness which seemed moments ago cloistered about her now arose in a harrowing orchestration; round about the quiet edges of the fields, from the randomness of tree and bush, the peculiarities of the even the most infinitesimal creature and element distinguished themselves, ascended the heavy air and converged: the timid rasp of the first evening crickets, the vexations of stem, leaf and petal half starved already by the heat of June. The quickening of cold blooded things, the patient ticking of spiders at their looms, and the thrum of wings, all sounded with the echo of a great drum. The advancing dusk had a dense velvet quality to it, and he imagined for an instant being suffocated by it before he could reach her. He felt ill with the thick and resonant afternoon pressing on him, and flagging in the shade for a moment, called out to her; she did not hear. However, securing her horse she came round again going toward the road. He knew her disposition, that she _would_ desert him without further provocation, and shut herself away for days until whatever melancholy she labored under was forgotten or reasoned into oblivion. It was unthinkable that she part from him now, but he had nothing to keep her.

"Where are you going?"

"I'm going home. Better though I should make camp in those far hills and live out the peaceful days of a hermit's life."

"A poor exchange for the plans we had. You cannot mean to leave things this way!"

She paused gazing at him as if all he said were a mystery.

"He is bluffing or he has engaged in some fraud to suit his purpose. Either way what is the sense of being defeated by it? Go and nurse your misery if you will, but remember you are not the only one suffering.

"Then it is you for I am too tired even for misery."

"If he were a liar, or wrong and it was proved, how weary would you be then?"

"It shall not be proved tonight at any rate."

"Well, we are vanquished, alas. Do what you will, the power of reason is almost beyond me, and I am beginning to feel rather indecorous anyhow."

She had made to depart again, but on this turned back, a peculiar attentiveness in her manner. "I did not mean I _would_ go, or that I meant to leave you, only that I wished to be somewhere other than this dismal abaddon."

"But I shall_ not _leave it so, for fear that I will be compelled to return to it and traverse it endlessly. Will you not spare a few hours to preserve me from such extremity?"

"What a wag you are! I don't wonder I should marry you and set up housekeeping in a circus tent."

"I see my sober distress has restored your good cheer. I'll take that, and swear to conduct myself graciously, if you swear to make the best of _my_ endeavors."

"And if they come to naught?"

"Then I have still given an estimable performance and you have still been my partisan for half a night; an admirable feat for us both."

"Let us start again tomorrow. I can't help but imagine dire magic at work, delaying us at the crossroad like that. Besides, I wish a more coherent review of what transpired. I won't continue with such confusion weighing down my soul."

"You have made up your mind I see, and the best I can hope for is another night in hell, thrashing about in that decrepit tomb you have exiled me to."

Along the road he retrieved the scattered papers, impaled on thorn bushes and driven into ruts, folding them thrice and stuffing them into his pockets as if they were an illicit history dropped carelessly by fate. All the long way home she did not walk beside him, but kept to the other side of the road. She refused even to look at him, though he knew, once or twice while his senses were otherwise engaged she did peer across the absurd distance, and not entirely with malice. He wanted to be cross with her, to rebuke her for her obstinate refusal of him, her cruelty, her indifference to his appeals. He might easily be as stern as any master and have things ordered as he pleased, but he knew better the true sovereign; often, regarding her as now, all ambition all vanity passed away. No future, and no past haunted him, he could find nothing else but the rapture of the hour, and forgetting the balance of time altogether believe as she, all else was immaterial.


	17. Solstice

Two weeks passed before they again attempted the long journey; though the interim began with a small misfortune the days were not harried, and there were no circumstances to divert them. As it went so often, they had the tendency of simply forgetting everything when they were together.

The morning after meeting Edgar, they started off late and indolent. Out of sorts, Cathy assumed she was merely a casualty of too much disharmony and not enough food. It soon became apparent however, she'd caught an illness from her nephew. While she was only plagued with lassitude and a slight cold, Hareton was confined to his cot with a frightful cough and a high fever. Ellen, who had nursed her, Heathcliff and Hindley through numerous childhood ailments without flinching, was unusually distraught, so Cathy resolved to stay in the event someone needed to fetch the doctor, or worse. Despite the panic the boy was as right as ever in a day or two.

Always superstitious when it came to the abodes of sickness Ellen announced her intention to take the child visiting with her until the house was sanitized of bad spirits. Ere he was running around again she had him bundled off into the fresh air. Though she always relied on her own feet to take her up and down the roads, to Heathcliff the idea of a woman plodding across the moors, unescorted with a small child, was absurd. He offered to accompany her as far as she needed to go, no matter she persistently refused, and would hear no more of it. As a compromise he repaired one of the old traps and gave her Surabi to pull it. Ellen's holiday eventually lasted more than a week.

It was novel to have the house to themselves,without the attendant censure of housekeepers and children they were lost in the stillness,and time became pleasantly disordered. Still it was far from a celebration; the temperate murmur of the day abiding long enough with idle hours, often betrayed beneath its congenial surface, an atrocious clamor . It was so, each began believing every corner of the house was haunted by revenants which could not be expelled with any incantation; memory, the parts and particles of lives and dreams long gone from hosts hundreds of years in their graves, now in flux with the atoms of the air. Not a sound onto itself, it merely effected fancifully the natural din; birds were prophets and ships , the wind now a poet, now an executioner holding proclamation. The floorboards, the walls at a turn fine flocks and herds, at another old hags bent to gossip. At first intriguing, it became much less so when they began believing they heard within, the timbre of their own memories.

But such whimsy was rare, for the days were largely spent outdoors, in the fresh sobering air. Once or twice they made the trip to Mytholme to spend the day in the gardens to be, dreaming trees and flowers and monuments into every quiet corner. The days were glad enough, and being so all pressing matters fell dead to the wayside. No one disturbed them; the hours were theirs to occupy as they wished. However,the calm was only the residual charm of their sudden fortunate sovereignty, for with night the wistful peace vanished like a cloud of warm breath in winter.

Whether they spent the hours after dark night walking, or busy with idle amusements and menial chores, at midnight, punctually they retired to their separate chambers,one biding downstairs until the other was locked safely away. They did not like to meet in the hallway, to see the other pausing one instant, unguarded at an open chamber door. Too often however Heathcliff waited, if just to see her start at encountering him. Stopping her at her threshold he could unseat time, decree seconds were days, days were centuries. While they stood, she, trapped against the wall and his fingers twined fast with hers as he leaned over her, they neither spoke nor moved. Each kept the others gaze, each measured their own substance by the others pulses, the lamp raised between them burning low, its flame guttering and sparking, playing hob with their shadows. As soon as he eased his hold she became a weight, sinking down the wall in a mock faint. When by necessity he loosened his fingers from hers she came round at once and ducking away beneath his arm slipped into her room; the cannonade of the heavy door, the clash of the lock, here the night ended, and both in their isolation found sleep rare and fleeting. It was approaching the end of this time, nearly a fortnight after turning back at the crossroad, when amity as they knew it those few days departed entirely.

Earlier in the day Cathy sustained an injury to her leg climbing rocks, and while it was not grievous, it had sent them into temporary exile about the grounds of the house, and both were feeling slightly defeated. Just after dark they were idling in the silent parlor fixedly pursuing separate occupations by their own small share of candle-light, each mutely dreading the hour of parting. Exempting themselves from protocol for two weeks had yielded no mutinies or revelations, but neither had foregone the opportunity in the absence of any society whatever to go about as they pleased, hence they temporarily reverted to the likes of frowzy children. Unshod, uncombed, untied. It did not go by Cathy that her companion, divested of his late imprisonments resembled more his former self, not merely in appearance but in spirit. And it did not go by Heathcliff that she was fairest when in her element, notwithstanding the commandments of her station, barefoot, her hair loose, pushed back distractedly behind one ear, a book in her lap and an old shawl around her shoulders. By way of a Stolen glance now and then, these thoughts gained authority over all others.

He sat at a small table scattered over with the bits and pieces of a disemboweled contraption he was working on, an impressive telescope or spy glass whose corpse he had unearthed in a rubbish pit in Mytholme, and Cathy was stretched on a bench reading _an essay on the principles of vegetation and tilling. _She had a bothersome habit of drawing her knee up when she read to use as a support for her chin; but more often she unconsciously resorted to bumping it very lightly and rhythmically against whatever near corresponding vertical surface there happened to be; wall, chair ,or bale. Here it was the bench back, and each muffled jolt set Heathcliff's teeth on edge. Engrossed as she was, it was soon apparent the verdurous wisdom's of Jethro Tull left something to be desired, for she augmented the task, and the present aggravation with peculiar roundelay where the written word, a sermon on toads and dung gardens, was integrated absurdly with an old tragical ballad, the repetitive being slight variants of the former. Bent low over the cleaning of some cogs he began reflexively to follow her chorus, any alterations within the refrain being predicted by the last stanza. Delivered with dual resonance, it became ridiculous, tenfold. In an instant however the concert ceased with the thump of dusty pages shut together.

"Heathcliff, _why_ do you ape my song?"

"_Why_ do _you _disrupt my tranquility?

"It's robbery"

"It's a sin"

"My melody was very pleasing to me until you commandeered it; sing it backwards now so your thievery can be undone."

"My _meditation _was quite agreeable with _me. _How will you give that back?

"It isn't worth a farthing. Your brand of dismal rumination can be found in anything-come take it then, if you dare!"

She seized the small cushion she'd been leaning on and flung it at him. Hitting its target it then plowed a path through the table full of debris scattering it far and wide and putting out his light. She heard him curse, diving to the floor in the darkness in effort to retrieve the pieces which had fallen there. Just as quick, all noise ceased; she heard nothing from him, not even a breath. Her small candle burned to low to afford her any view save a few inches all around. She reached to retrieve it, to rise, find him and offer reparations but before she could move she felt her feet clutched by two iron hands. In a flash of terror she tried to free herself, but they at once found a surer purchase on her legs, her arms; a warm body pinned her to the bench and a warm voice spoke;

"Cathy, be still"

"Get off me-crocodile!"

"I own you, until you give suitable recompense"

"For what?"

"For my murdered repose."

"Foolishness, relinquish my tune this instant or never!"

"Really, all your nonsense, in reverse?"

"If it's only nonsense then where is the difficulty? Think fast your time is running out."

Conquered, he searched out the last words in her canticle, and picking it up from there found little trouble in unraveling the rest. Singing only to an end, laboring over mindless phrases he did not appreciate right away the transposed gibberish was plain ribaldry, a cleverly debauched parable fixed on particular unspeakable, beastly feats of cohabitation. Once aware of it, and also that she was laughing, his face turned hot with shame and he made a hasty, but ultimately futile attempt to put distance between her and himself. She held on to him, but her mirth was warm, never mocking;

"You are a true simpleton."

"Given, but if you think I'll finish that disgusting hymn you are twice so."

"Larceny excused for naught-did you believe it? Well never mind the rest. I am lost though as to what recompense I shall offer you."

Solicited thus his mind could have gone a dozen glorious places, but currently he was not keen on stealing too far in any direction. He let his head drop to the hollow of her shoulder to hide his mortification within the tendrils of her hair, to let its heat dissipate within the warmth of her skin, and so stalled he made an odd request, considering what had just passed.

"Sing to me Cathy, something old-nay, if it must be called up from its grave all the better."

After thinking a moment she began;

"_Awake, my soul, and with the sun__  
__Thy daily stage of duty run;_  
_Shake off dull sloth, and joyful rise,_  
_To pay thy morning sacrifice."_

This might have been equally distasteful in its way as the other, but just as she knew best how to goad him, so too did she know how to appease. The hymn returned him whether he was wont to go or not, to a winter night in his seventh year; the chapel filled for evening service, faces surrounding him as inhospitable and stony as the churchyard walls, and the doors left open to the driving snow to remind attendant sinners of deaths abiding chill. It was all nothing to him, for he stood imperishable in the doomed congregation; on one side his sturdy benefactor, on the other his own black eyed soul.

She sang; when she'd sung every word she began humming, then sang again so it seemed a very long while they lay there. He played with the skeins of her hair, the ties and lace of her dress, trying to discern, from reckless floral arabesques and perpetual lianas a pattern in the threadwork, until his senses could scarcely bear the ambiguity, and he was compelled to seek out a far more gracious scape native to his soul. She had not touched him the whole while they lay there, keeping her hands anywhere out of the way. Now as he charted her features, as one who has unexpectedly exhumed beauty from ashes, she put her arms round him, stilled his hand by laying her cheek there saying quietly, as if she were afraid the jealous night would hear;

"I grieve another minute to pass that you are not my husband. If they will lead to nothing, let us follow them no longer; Heathcliff make them still."

How the sound of her words struck him, a carillon echo moving through deep water, a thrilling in the blood both liberating and portentous, so in answering he was unsure thought and word were one;

"I shall annihilate all time if you command it justly, and be your husband this instant. If there were nothing else would it matter? Cathy let it be so, the night is deathless, and insufferable when we are parted."

Only silence answered him, lingering too long, though it was of little consequence; she was there thus he found no complaint with it, even if situation of an oak bench was far less than fitting, their immediacy was such that physical autonomy vanished, one could hardly diminish in a sigh or suffer a skipping pulse that the other did not fill the deficit with their own, and he relished this exchange; that neither could draw life's breath but that the other first let it go.

"I asked too much again, did I not? I have forgotten in two weeks what our purpose is."

"And what is it, if not this? Ask me for anything, but _I _will deem all of creation insufficient and offer you my life instead."

She scoffed, knowing she had been provoked.

"Only your life, what is that worth?"

He whispered into the soft tangle of her hair;

"That depends entirely on you-Cathy let me die for you tonight."

"To have you hate me, and revile yourself?"

"_Hate_ you? Does that seem even now with all reason, a possibility?-if so I have done more wrong by you than ever I can compensate for!"

He raised himself up to peer at her through the dimming light; where its sluggish beams before had revealed the hidden colors of her eyes, the sparks of cassia and violet too often subdued, now they returned only an exquisite blackness, and even the impending shadows did not mask the new warmth in her face. Moving one arm away she pushed her hand against his shoulder, yet kept the other arm fast round him. With the summer of his own hand he found the smoothness of her knee. Just above it was the evil spreading bruise she had acquired out on the mountain, and he pressed his palm to it until she cried out. He kissed her then, drawing in the dark slow coil of her breath. For once she did not repel or stall him but returned equally what he offered.

"Tell me now that I will hate you, that I could _ever _hate you."

"Heathcliff we ought to say good-night"

"What is a good night? Make it so first, for as it stands the expression is a travesty"

She turned away now from his second appeal, and the world was a degree colder.

"Heathcliff I cannot love you, you are unjust."

"But you do, you _are_ even as you denounce me. These arms and legs are a prison and I forget any liberty outside of them. What is between us? No authority, no tyrants, no scripture no devils no angels, all lies and trash and nonsense."

"It is none of those; altogether they haven't the power of sabotage that you alone possess."

"I see what it is then; you do not forgive me still for the horrid trick I played on you a while ago?"

"It's not an issue of blame or pardon, only truth."

"Truth_- bah_! What truth? How can you so take to heart a temporary madness yet dismiss the enduring certainty that _I am_ dying for you-always-"

"Don't. I am _scared_ too! Never did I fear anything, not in this world or the next until you vanished. Now it bides with me, it comes and goes at strange times at its will, and I manage it as best I can."

"And I so grieve for that wrong my love. I always will"

Subdued now beneath a dark cloud, he sat up against the bench; she did not leave him in his solitude but a moment, settling by him and taking his hands in hers genially.

"See now I have spoiled everything! We should forget it by following through tomorrow as we planned. If there is someone who will marry us, who-ever or whatever he is, let us have done with it."

"Ah stop, I am in danger of being drowned by sentiment!"

"Tomorrow then-go upstairs now; I will trust you to get fast into your chamber."

"As you will"

He hadn't any intention of locking himself away before her, and she knew it. Leaping from the bench she ran past him to the stairs, he caught her however, halfway up and they fell painfully in a riot of laughter, pushing, kicking and pounding to keep the other from reaching the landing first. Cathy at last broke free and had nearly reached her door when he made one last jump and caught her wholly, holding her against the wall with such intent for an instant she could barely breathe. He delayed until her laughter was stilled entirely, until catching her gaze and looking long enough he assured himself of no wrongdoing on his part, and kissed her again; starved, deep, it sent the last out of memory. Never, even if he had thus far invented a thousand ways to kiss, to steal or barter a small conciliation, had he realized it so. Transfixed by the sensation, the drawing softness and heat of his mouth on hers, her mind ceased to form its own thoughts and instead found its associations in carnivorous jungle blooms, pearls in oysters and thermal drafts. Still she conjured an inherent guilt; this euphoria should not be theirs; the first flower given the right of man and wife alone, but then if wedded men and women had such affections to anticipate every night why did they appear ever and anon, so disenchanted with each-other?

Her mind went on, went blank; She drifted on a dark singing sea, anchored only by his body, her arms round him. How long it went she did not know, but at some juncture they at last stood apart, dazed, altered. Leaning over her, pressing one hand to the wall near her head he seemed at once newly stalwart and unsteady. She felt his breath still, hot and saporous against her cheek, and with the faintest blush of vestal reserve left to her she turned away, unable to meet his gaze. He bent to look in her face then, and there was such light in his eyes, and brilliance in his flushed face that she could not help but smile; a phantom, also faint but certain. There was a quickening warmth about him, still she could scarcely stir as if motion were an enemy waiting to strike all present joy from her, and she felt stupid for beaming so, though it was the softest and quietest of expressions, for all the world sensed more than seen.

She was hardly naive; she knew in her way the wondrous caprices in the anatomy of desire, though she kept her understanding a secret from her abettor, letting him believe she perceived nothing, allowing him to preserve whatever modesty and ambiguity he would for prospect's sake; now catching the flash of his eye with hers, they were both betrayed by their own soft alarm. Taking a step back, he turned away from her calling himself out with an incoherent oath; however this display of ignominy could not be sustained long, and was expended at last in a dismal laugh. Daring to glance at her again, he found her marvelously untroubled, and while this did little to remedy his condition, it did much for his courage. She drew him back, and the warm current of her words absolved him. The paradox was not lost on him, that she pacified him now as she would a wild horse or an injured bird.

"All is fair Heathcliff! You have been too long away in your mucky cities and prudish societies, and you forget that I have not, and the precepts of these spurious acquaintances are not mine. I am glad to see the fresh air of home has healed your body if it has not yet restored your mind."

"Own it then, and let my mind be dashed!"

And he laughed again; diffident yet, he was at least cheerful.

""Fare thee well, then" he continued, now quite sober; " I shall not allow so much liberty again until it is ordained, as you wish, I swear, but an elixir runs through your blood and mine, not meant for sleep and solitude. In a while you will feel sick and cold shut up alone with no alleviation, and I cannot bear it but that I suffer the same."

"What do you mean-_suffering_? Don't speak so; I can hardly bear the prospect right now"

"Precisely, Sleep tonight in my chamber, and let me rest in yours, then you will know."

Amused by the proposition, despite its solemn presentation she was on the verge of another fit of mirth, but mellowed in a new light she saw less reason to question than to believe.

Their parting was a small apocalypse, worse for her because she knew it was at her will, and it was on her lips, just as fiery as the kiss left there, to recant. So persuasive it was that she unconsciously pressed her fingers to her mouth to keep it back.

Exiled at last to her sterile prison, the frigid, looming shadows which served as the night's pitiable company for her Heathcliff, it was not long until she understood what he meant. Her blood was volcanic still; she could not have slept if she'd been drowned in the waters of Lethe. She employed the discomfort of a straight-backed chair, hoping somehow the rigor of maintaining a severe posture might bring on sufficient weariness, but to no avail. A quarter hour on and a sudden burst of frustration compelled her to kick at the bed frame. Unsatisfied she stood, and unleashing a string of curses kicked the chair across the room. On the threshold of a true paroxysm she froze, realizing that Heathcliff might be listening, but if he was he did not give himself away, and from there she remained silent.

Her composure then only afforded the liberties of utter boredom; gazing about, musing blandly and talking to oneself into a circuitous pattern of torment. It was in the idle contemplation that she began to see the character of the room, how modestly her love inhabited every aspect; his clothes tossed about, his papers and ink-pots on a makeshift desk, along with one of her gloves and a deer she had fashioned for him out of straw and twine, and everywhere bits of tallow he had shaped into things-birds and comets and moths. In a wide leather bound book she found fine examples of cartography; continents and towns, mountains and rivers and roads drawn with astounding skill, and she knew it was his hand for his writing and notes filled every corner. In the accident of place and time she glimpsed finally a bit of the world he had lived in without her; tracing the byways and passes his feet had traveled so long, and so far away from home, she was overcome.

She stretched out on the cavernous bed with the book clutched to her breast, feeling as she did every night after he was gone, the warmth drain from her, as if rendered in the slow killing embrace of sleep she became sleep, as cold and unaware, a thing distilled in snow. Did her mind fashion then from longing, a finer cradle? Was she lost and hallucinating or awakening to something new, ever higher? The bed smelled of him, the very room, the drapery, the shadows, the glow of the wood in the dim lamplight, sang of him. Not a pale formless echo, but a living presence; the dry, dark bite of smoke and winter leaves, degrees of purple and blue, red myrrh and black clay, and beneath the cool redolence, the salt and fever of his skin, the incense of savage earth and the lay of dreaming beasts. These knowing things, these runes were the most reverent secret between herself and Heathcliff. In the place she floated now he was always her lover, never had he gone, never had he been any less.

A faint pervading pain gripped her viscerally, and she crushed her hands together to fend it off, but it crept, stretching fine black tendrils, up through her spine, her ribs, and down through her legs, in time giving way to a soft, stinging pleasure. It took her down into vivid dreams where she and Heathcliff, no longer bound within their tenuous frames of flesh and bone prevailed in contours, scapes, shades and colors yet unknown to living eyes. Nowhere and everywhere at once it was part of her sleep, part of the darkness, then becoming sleep and darkness altogether it consumed her with such might she found she must press her face to the pillow to keep from crying out. Her dreams were dulcet then; the fleecy wanderings of infancy, pale spring colored and warm. But deep beneath their pastel light, like glimpses of Polyphemus was something else. She saw the pages of Heathcliff's maps turning quickly and in the flicker of scripts and legends, mountains and seas discerned an appalling miscalculation. She could not catch it however, drifting powerless back up through bright skies. By morning it would not matter, even if she had thought to check the book, for it had simply vanished.


	18. Ruins

They set off that afternoon, taking a higher road than before, and by dusk reached the incline of a wide valley. Below them stretched a broad forest cut through by a river emerging at one end like a sapphire ribbon, and twisting away into a vaporous horizon. Though practical to keep to the road a stupefying gloom possessed the skies, so a chance of escape from the oppression into the verdant shadows was too appealing.

In short time they reached the wood, and after resting the horses near a small stream, resolved to delay an hour or two, not arriving in town until after sunset at the commencement of evening service. After all it would be advantageous to show their faces for prayer. The plan however went unfulfilled, for within a half hour they had taken to the road again. Though it might have been better to linger, they were restless, inclined to believe fate was mutable and unguarded hopes too readily defaced by pitiless Gods, furthermore, the situation did not prove reviving as they hoped; a high wind began blowing, stirring the listless clouds and changing the canopy to an intemperate sea; sulfurous hues of amber and wine pitched and darted, huge stands of fern thrashed like the arms of a leviathan, and the sultry, lupine odor of earth and loam rose up at every step and clung to their skin. At last the gusts churned brackish through the dense cathedral, offering no reprieve from the heat, and the trees groaned as it passed through without bending or palpitating; only a resonant shudder traveling through ancient roots stirred the floor.

Another byway took them an hour northwest, to a ruin whose like was rare in their own vicinity. Though a few relics could be found not a mile from Wuthering Heights, some in possession still of their treasures as well as their walls, still serviceable bastions for the denizens of Yorkshire should a Roman army rise from the earth to take on fleshly forms once more, none set so fearless against eternity as this one. Gazing down from its hill with disregard at the land below, unconcerned with the passing eons burying all lesser landmarks, it retained within its walls and all about its rayless casements and monstrous portals the expectation that at any moment it must stand to, or chamber with pride enemies and natives now eight hundred years at their rest. The decay which crept round its battlements showed not its weakness; instead it gave evidence, in failure to conquer, of the ancestor's fortitude.

With its tower to the north and it habitats to the south, it stood to remind time, and passerby of its intention by hosting yet it's own kingdom, though the shadows whirring and shifting beneath every escarpment and within every arch were winged, not human. All manner of bird life from wood and fell found its way there making of the old castle a curious new planet, wherein each genus while agreeably commingling with its brethren, kept its own corner of the monolith generation upon generation. Yet, If one stood unmoving, for fifty years or a hundred in observance, they'd have seen in each succeeding decade, a slight shifting of the population; for instance a returning flock of summer turtle doves, or orioles moving eave by eave to a more southern situation, while nesting jackdaws alternated from the highest turrets, to a kitchen stairwell, and so on. With winter arrivals, spring departures and other quaint migrations, the whole might look to the watcher like a feathered chessboard. If not been overwhelmed by a dreadful urgency, Cathy would have liked nothing better than to find an agreeable vantage point to watch for hours the dramas playing out amongst the aggregation; if she had not felt as if she must keep moving like a soldier marching. She did not protest for she knew Heathcliff suffered in kind. Even at their infrequent respites he was alert and charged, being near him was akin to experiencing the stinging change in the air which heralds a lightning storm. Consequently they did not spend agreeable late afternoon wandering about the grounds as lovers of old, instead they made to disturb the chilly senescent dusk of the monolith, and whatever mumbling wraiths dwelt therein.

If they sought fellowship in their own plight amongst the erudite phantoms and antiquities, it would be hard won. Spare evidence remained of the loves, losses and character of the first possessors, apart from a host of granite forms divested here and there of extremities; a nose or an arm or foot vanished, as if sacrificed in adjuration. They ascended boldly by any means to the highest point, and though the stairways resembled the steeps of a weathered ziggurat, there was enough purchase for any one nimble enough, or brave enough to attempt it. They viewed each breadth ascended as a triumph over the curse of their own earthly encumbrances.

Along each landing with its particular caverns they found treasuries of the most useless sort; piles of furniture turned to firewood, dented brass, green copper and mouldering webs of drapery and carpet. One room disclosed a flock of geese settled around a fine old cabinet. How they made an easy living at such a lonely height was anyone's guess. They appeared only mildly bothered at the abrupt invasion of a pair of ungainly two footed monsters, and after a brief flurry of wings forgot them altogether. Emboldened by the safety of the gathering dark Cathy invested herself very cautiously of an egg. She would never have attempted this gentle thievery at home, knowing full well the fierce check those beaks were capable of delivering, with more besides if you did not leap fast enough out of the way. Before securing it her pocket, she held it up to listen for any minute stirring within. She detected no half formed life; instead, as one who sees a vision or makes a colossal discovery all at once, she was startled to hear music within. It was not quite a tune, which she could fix and hum back to herself, rather, it was a thin golden summery chime, half bell half voice going round, as if trapped inside it were trying find amusement in circling about to meet its own echo. Alert at his companion's sudden fascination Heathcliff received no answer for his curiosity. Possessiveness seized her and she hastened the egg from any chance of his grasp. Holding it safely behind her, she studied him for a minute or two, until she determined there were no schemes brewing. Still she was not entirely reassured;

"Don't gape as if _I _am impractical. You have a compulsion for stepping on fairy rings."

"And I have paid dearly for my offenses. What does it have to do anyhow with the object you've hidden behind your skirts?"

She held the egg out to him like a sacrifice and he took it, staring at it as it lay in his hand, until she indicated by impatiently touching her hand to her ear what she meant. Upon following her instruction his perplexity outmatched hers by a shade or two, and in a moment he set it quietly down on a ledge leaning there with his arms folded, gloomy, and distracted.

"Well, did you hear it?"

His answer was only an attempt to redirect the subject entirely.

"Did you know there are shells the brine tosses up in which the waves and the surf can be heard, forever after they have been taken from the shore? The churning of the water, and all things in its realm; the gulls ,the terns, ships bells, even voices and the moods of tide and weather."

"I know; it is in the same way voices of the dead are trapped in certain stones."

"It isn't magic, just the peculiarities of acoustics and one's own pulses playing tricks. There is a cottage we passed a half mile back in coming here, likely it is just a constant fracas from there carried on the wind and picked up here."

He touched his finger gingerly to the egg, rolling it back and forth.

"You _did_ hear something, and will not tell me what."

"I could make nothing out of it."

Of course this was not true, though truth did not explicate it any better; He heard close to his ear not chimes, but a faint row, a slight disturbance in the steady concordant hum of neutral sounds; at once it recalled the first indistinct rumblings of a thunderstorm, and the murmur of someone sobbing in a distant room, the low coughing gasp which shakes the air abruptly, leaving it dark and bruised before being muffled. He believed relaying its character to Cathy could only invite doom. Her intuition, always sharp when it came to certain things in nature was especially tuned to his just then. Her own young features were shaped in his, the heavy lidded eyes downcast, fixed on inconsequential distance, the lips pressed in an expression of grief, transitory as it was unmanageable. Comprehending the weight of old agitations she felt ashamed to press him, though being naturally mulish she _would_ bring it up when he turned again to a warrior.

With the last rays of light slipping away ahead of them, they discovered another chamber across the corridor. Judging by its revenants, the grand wreckage in every corner cloaked in pallid filth, it must surely have been once the apartment of a king.

They stationed themselves on the wide ledge of a casement in an oriel looking out upon the hills. The situation offered a commanding a view of the rising moon, a demilune the color of beeswax lighting the room exquisitely, so details which had been consumed by the concentration of twilight emerged as if etched out by a thousand candle flames. By this pleasant glow emerged the shades of a magnificent tragedy; the elegant bones of furniture held together only by lace-works of dust mocking the shapes of the silks and linens long ago vanished, the rotted leavings of great portraits still clinging to the confused angles of tall broken frames; but these gave only contradictory, somnolent remembrances of the chamber, for against one wall, overshadowing all the crushed splendor stood a monumental panel of pink sandstone, carved up and down with flora, and figures in the style of little couples variously intertwined, and this was astonishing. Cathy was drawn to it right away finding liberation in contemplating it wholly; her attention followed one curve into another as they swept over each other, drawing inward to the smallest point and rushing out again to a new path. Heathcliff, keeping his post at the window was transfixed as well, not by curving forms, but by the eyes of the lovers. Dozens of them looked out from the shadows; artful, joyful, or half mast and dark with ecstasy. They all seemed to be aware of him, as he was of them.

"How they carry on" she said, to no one, "I so wish to visit whatever land such things are born from, to live there even, in a place always warm and smiling. Have you ever seen anything like it? "

"Perhaps, such ugly little statues, one might see the like anywhere."

Lying yet again, he _had_ seen these effigies before, in the same place where he found his own origins. But he did not wish to remember it, any more than he desired their sly, sagacious presence now. In the dark he laughed at himself, at his own dullness of mind. He knew everything, he knew nothing at all.

Silence again. Drawing closer, her fingers traced the same details her vision had moments before; hands, jeweled ankles, the places where bodies met, the graceful turn of an embracing arm or the bruising grasp of frenzied ardor. The color rose to his face then, and was glad she took scant notice of him. He remembered how freely once she had bestowed such tactile wanderings on him, long ago when it hardly mattered; small streams bubbling beneath the enduring rage of existence, going by or sinking deep beyond retrieval, but keener still his thoughts resurrected the previous night; he had not made peace with it as yet, returning again and again to his shadow looming, swallowing hers, the bliss dissolving his conscience, _subito. _fleeting shame and tenacious fear, that he was for all, a cur._  
_

He had nearly forgotten their purpose in the journey, returning to it he was on the verge of taking the subject up when she turned, abruptly free of the carnal spell, observing the moon was very high, and since the time for evening services must have certainly passed already might they stay a while longer. He agreed halfhearted, feeling there was no purpose to it; whatever personifications of joy or agony there were to be acquainted with in these rooms had come and gone. Cathy settled near him on an overturned trunk, and they both set their gazes toward the sky, for Dian's horn curved just below the highest arc of the casement and her light, drawn up like a silk train left the room once more a formless murk. The geese far off in their sacred corner were settled for the night with only the occasional rustle of wings, and the gentle nattering amongst neighbors. To him, the remote din had lost its uniqueness, evoking not the Habitudes of graceless fowl but the deliberate impossibly charming patter of a lady at her evening ablutions. He'd a notion, not entirely unpleasant, that if he allowed himself a nights rest here, by the time the sun painted the tops of the battlements again he would belong entirely to her world, whoever she was, without memory of his own. Dazed, he came to at the sensation of Cathy's arms around his neck, her voice very close to his ear.

"'Sleep no more!' –delinquent –what were you dreaming of?"

"That this night was over and we were already growing decrepit by the hearth."

"Awful. I'm thankful to my mind for not taking such reckless leaps."

"Very well, what have your thoughts been while I lolled here like an imbecile?"

Silence, a breath across his cheek sultry as violets returned him smartly to the enterprise at hand. All the same, taken up in the rush, for the interim he could not articulate his thoughts, and she met him directly with her own first.

"Do you remember long ago in another room dark as this one how we danced, on Christmas Eve with snow coming in the window and all the old ones below forgetting psalms and carols for _poor Miss Bailey,_ cracking the floorboards like the devil himself were drawing the bow?"

"Half the village was there and they were potted weren't they, the fools. We could have set the house on fire without them noticing. To answer you, yes I remember, what are you getting at?"

She'd drifted again, briefly lost in soft, aimless song;

_O sister, O sister, take my gown  
And draw me up upon dry ground...'_

And coming round again, said;

"Dance with me now. It is a way of courting. We never went about civilly, and after tonight it will be too late. One dance then we can declare ourselves sweethearts, and marry with impunity. If the air transmits harmonies as you say, they will find us."

If he were a master scribe, he could not have put down how this affected him. He knew she asked half in jest, and likewise was he disposed to turn her raillery back on her, nonetheless the sentiment behind it was genuine, and, as she had not thus far expressed it so plainly, he was wild to justify it, to address it forthright. except with her request she also set his mind back too profoundly to the long ago winter night when she, barefoot ,clad in crimson velvet, scaled the walls of his prison, and in the cold pitiless dark he recognized for the first time her love was as mad as his own. It was a revelation for one so young, and in unbearable hindsight he saw his now invalid prospects, how he might have conquered the world upright, and been another man entirely. But then as in the present his mind was elsewhere, resolved to vengeance and ruin and now, recompense. Why was her regard, her soul ever present at such times and elusive at all others? Another desultory setting another mislaid evening. He prayed to forget vain objectives and be for one hour at her service, instead, frustrated he resorted to scorn.

"Sweethearts... Now you are stirring the sea with a teaspoon don't you think?"

Even while he rebuked her He could not help turning about, seeking her out, the source of warmth whose presence always marked the difference a restless soul might experience emerging from the long shadowed tomb into sun's arduous glow. Straining towards it, he found it withdrawing. She had shifted to his right arm hoping to find it agreeable enough to her petition the rest of him would be reluctant to argue, to no avail. The night air lost its summer charm and became clammy, wrapping itself about them so he felt he could not move at all, no matter the coercion. He had come to hate such cloistered orders of darkness increasingly through the past months, he was never so aware of it as now, and it wore on his nerves sorely.

"I suppose, being the more ignorant one, I do err in not acting on your proposal. So tell me again my genius of seemly passion, how does one accomplish a well-meant cosseting?"

Provoked now, her voice was cold, and clashed against the stones with an awful resonance.

"You decry our friendship and my sympathy so readily, is this fair warning against marriage? Shall your entire reserve of affection be all the less for ownership?"

"_Ownership_? God help me, is that how you see it? If so then we pursue a wayward course. I only meant-"

"Yes I understand you; coming to your 'wayward course' doesn't it puzzle you now and then, why we should be compelled to marry at all? After all, what have we in common with all those others whose commitment lies solely in the details of stale dogma? We were forfeit the day we were born"

"What acrimony, still I can find no disagreement, save one."

"And what is it?"

"Unrefined at present as anything could be; ask me later tonight with another aspect, and I will have it precisely."

"How _precisely _childish, I only asked for a dance. If I had imagined it to be such a task I'd certainly never have bothered you. Why must you be so full of thorns and ditches?"

The argument terminated fortuitously in a sigh of exasperation, for as chafed as she was, Cathy held fast to the dim optimism the night yet held good fortune. In turn, Heathcliff attempted to illustrate remorse by way of a warmer tone; nevertheless his skills of repentance were doubtful, and his ideas, haphazardly expressed kept him in constant peril of being banished from favor.

"Please let's purge this from our minds. It was nothing against you or your ideas, this room is disorienting. I feel as if I am losing my reason with so many eyes staring at me through the dark. While you find an aesthetes pleasure in those creatures, I find a conspiracy."

"An aesthete's pleasure? Maybe, bonny boy, _they_ see the like in you."

"You find me bonny now do you? A moment ago you reviled me and rightly so perhaps"

"Ever I have found you, ever I will; both of us have despised and been despised equally too often. It is enough."

"I'll take that and be glad. As for despising _you _if such was your inference, don't ever think it. It is inconceivable."

He prized her small pardons too well, not because he felt himself deserving, but for the promise they offered of folly and torment being assailable. If she were kind, if she were generous then so too was the world. However, at the moment beneath her easeful tone was something chary, almost obdurate and it chilled his blood. He tried to dismiss it, to shut it out the way one shuts a door against a winter wind. While unease faded at the hest of more vital concerns enough remained to keep him heedful, for the better part of the evening at least. All the while he wondered over this, she stood at a safe distance, watching. Now she came to him and leaning against his knee drew her arms about him in her familiar girlish embrace; crushing, warm and absolute, he preferred her fierce imprisonment above all other things. But the affirmation, as he thought of it, that he was viable, and _they_ were indivisible, kept its own time, its own plans. Easing her restraint a little she kissed him, or tried, for he averted his face, looking toward the indifferent night. His explanation arrived half choked, laughable if not for the weight of the hour.

"Cathy don't, it will put me out of my mind."

Ignoring that, she kissed whatever was left to her of his obstinate countenance, all in innocence as it was it was hardly childish; they had become lovers nearly, in excruciating increments, rare minutes stretched out over months, and it was apparent to him now, even more so than the previous night when he had been the conductor, she had gathered them all like seeds and grown with them her own mad garden; the dark bloom of her breath again, the persistence softness of her wherever he was unguarded; her hands her mouth; impossible things. He dared not move, he struggled against it, trying to forget his own flesh and form, his boot pressed against the opposing stones of the arch as if to brace from falling into the night, or off of the world. In a moment she resigned her pursuit, though it hardly registered, for it seemed anything she did after was only a transfiguration of the same torment.

"Heathcliff, _why_ are you suddenly afraid of me?"

This was unbearable, he tried to find words, any word at all to discredit the thought, but he could not speak, only shake his head. While he was so tried she placed her hands on him, here and there listening with them like a healer.

"See here statue, you are in danger of breaking yourself against your fellow stones."

"I am not so brittle" he managed

"Not at all, so much more is the pity."

Overwhelmed finally, he threw his head back against the pillar. He saw bursts of color, stars and heard his own voice echoing defeat, exasperation. No longer paralyzed, he seized her in his arms, a strangler fig, and held her, if only to prevent by restraint, any more of those caresses

"You deal unfairly Cathy; why always does it come to this?"

"Because I must know where you fly, _out of your mind._ "

"Do your best and you might never know even then."

the romantic landscape before them seemed to stretch a million miles into the darkness, a plain where everything floated gently in cosmic disarray, the mists and the hills, the stars and the moon all mingling out of order. He released her, and sullen, stupefied, turned away entirely from it, balancing on the precipice of the casement while he she sat beside him leaning her head on her hand, he imagined for a moment a truce.

"It should not be this way, we have forgot our objective again I think, and turned our wedding night into a funeral. I don't wish for it to pass in such desolation."

He felt utterly wretched, knowing full well he was to blame for the impasse. With no defenses left he turned to her again in contrition and sweet regard. Renouncing his mad entreaty of the night before proved futile, despite the spies on the wall. They were forgotten, left to their own delirium. It was she who drew away, just as he had begun to believe they would never leave, that they might be condemned, shadows forever kissing in a window.

"Where do you fly then, Heathcliff?"

"How can I say? What language is there for it?''

"Last night you were free again for moment, and now these chains of yours rattle so ominously."

"Will you kiss me so,late tonight, and when tonight is over? for I feel have done some unspeakable wrong to someone, in some way. it may be the conviction of a raving lunatic, but I can't forget it, and it taints everything and I am only afraid by then you will regard me as something ghastly, an unfeeling beast, and never approach me again with such faith."

"You _are _mad tonight. but even you cannot annihilate my faith in you. Do not trouble yourself either, that I am naive; again you forget so much-and there is a pitiable distance between your understanding and mine. You've been away from the countryside far too long I think to remember the ways of beasts, they are never unfeeling. The genius of the beast is that it feels too much and suffers in it's solitude; but I shall never be wary of you, and you, shall never be alone"

Finding the way out of the ruin in the pitch dark proved a singular thrill. Nothing it seemed was where it had been previously; constant drafts, swampy breaths rising form deaths own domain told them too often they were in peril of leaving solid ground, and villainous shadows directed them to nowhere. Just when all began to seem hopeless they saw evenings fresh sky through a yawning portal and ran to it as if it might vanish locking the living world away for eternity.


	19. Anathea

By nine thirty the ruins were at a dreamlike distance once more, and the village lay before them. Because their detour took them so much farther into the night than intended they agreed at last with disappointment to the necessity of procuring a room, if there be any in that town, for the night. However, the sight that greeted them far down the broad, mile run of the main road made them forget it. Beyond the neat sweep of curious habitats, houses, shops and whatever else a well ordered place might require, all thrown together with hardly a spare space between, lay a chapel. It presided over the town with an enormous spire and a lofty window of colored glass. Ablaze with light its breadth and height were such that it appeared a splendid kaleidoscopic sun was setting behind the parish. Yet the chapel itself was no different than a dozen other crumbling sanctums seen thereabouts. It was enough though to quicken interest, and put out of mind any ideas of sleep for the time being.

One summer night they'd seen Gimmerton Kirk stirring very late, but it was a silent, secret thing; one uncertain glow moving furtively passed the narrow barred casements of the chapel, through the trees and past the staggered tombstones of Cathy's ancestors. Here was the final benison for a resident who had fasted himself into perdition, the tragedy being linked to a certain face, painted, etched, and drawn with maniacal consistency on anything which would hold a mark. A wild eyed swain whose entire being was the color of straw, they'd passed him once at market attempting to sell some of his canvases as if he were making one valorous effort to rid himself of his affliction. He was dead before the winter solstice, amongst his papers and panels, some still half finished. They were in their eleventh year then, and barely acquainted with death.

Stealing away close to midnight they hid behind an oak and watched as his coffin, pulled on a trap, was transported to the most remote corner of the cemetery, a spot so bleak that a half days worth of labor was needed to clear it before the hole could be dug. He was lowered and covered without a word, unattended except for the sexton who, removing his hat held it for a moment to his breast as he stood at foot of the fresh mound. When he departed, along with the flickering beam inside the chapel they crept towards the unmarked spot. It was not their first time keeping company in the graveyard; yet the hushed soul below them seemed in his exile to be kin to them. They sat for a good hour calling him up without answer till at last Cathy laid her head to the earth appearing to listen with great reverence.

"What does he say?"

"He says, he is now very sorry he is here and wishes he had not starved, for he misses a good meal powerfully, and has found the whole act a waste because his lover has shown herself to be jade in his absence."

Heathcliff never questioned the verity of this, coming back on many nights thereafter and putting whatever bread he could spare on the poor man's plot. He never made Cathy privy to his clandestine acts of charity. She never came back to discover the offerings at any rate, and mentioned the banished man rarely, except to imply that he was cursed and they should not again frequent that outland where he lay. His grave was soon overgrown and forgotten entirely; but he had come to believe through the years in prophesy, and the weedy specter of the doomed lover returned unbidden, too often. He was present now in _her_ questioning as if all along he'd been abiding in her conscience as well;

"Heathcliff, it is a funeral, for mercy's sake let us not go any farther I don't wish to cross paths with any more bad luck."

"Who would waste that many candles on a corpse? It is only a town meeting."

"A _meeting, _what sort of people converge so in the middle of the night? Are we to be married in a coven, and how are you acquainted with this hamlet anyhow?"

"Rarely, still enough to know the pastor is insomnious and might be seen by that light at any hour."

"Why, is he a guilty man?"

" No altruism thrives without dubious motivation."

They had dismounted the tired horses in favor of their own tired feet. Their pace was slow, for the lane stretched out in rutted undulations rising and falling in exhaustively hectic intervals. Halfway across was an alehouse, as dark as the rest of the row and they tied the horses in field behind near a cistern.

Approaching the church, they found besides the showy window and pointing tower, it bore one other marked difference from others of its like in that there was no front yard. One did not have to approach the entrance through a field of tombstones and trees. Even with the clear view, no obvious activity gave away the reason for the light. All was stillness and no one was about, though they observed for a good quarter of an hour. At last they were compelled, as if they were again vagrant children, to peer in the windows. They were too high for easy access, and this obligated Cathy to stand on her companion's shoulders clinging to the stone frame.

"What do you see?"

"Absolutely nothing remarkable; there is an old man arranging flowers near the chancel."

"That's all?"

"If it pleases you, he is a very, very old man, and there are great quantities of flowers, a garden's worth, and there are such colors and varieties, certainly they weren't meant for a funeral."

"Then it is quiet within, and we will not be amiss in entering."

"Somehow I feel we would be, he looks too much in his element, as if it were a fond vision of flowers and appointment and not actual at all."

"Well then, I have no issue stomping on anyone's dusty hallucination if it suits the purpose of living."

When they tried crossing the threshold discreetly, one of the massive oak doors caught and climbed a warp in the floorboard, consequently releasing itself with a crash on the other side. Startled at the disturbance, the attendant glanced up sharply from his preening, and pushing a pair of rusted spectacles back up to his eyes squinted hard at the disheveled pair.

"What are you about? It's bad enough, all this sorcery; ceremonies in the dark of night and sophistries, now you you're knocking down the walls! Well, the civilities aren't till ten yet, haven't you the character at least to leave the preparations holy?"

"We are not here for any service; we've come to see the reverend."

"Another, what is it this time, is it prison or the asylum where you've stowed your shoes?"

Looking down Cathy recalled that she had taken her boots off to stand on Heathcliff's shoulder. With quick shame she sat to reinstate them.

"It's neither. He is an old acquaintance; I've come to repay him a debt that's all."

"I suppose he's in the glebe then, counting stalks of rye. It won't do to have you sneaking up on him in the dark, whoever you are, so I'll fetch him myself."

The codger hurried away, soliloquizing to himself some bit of scripture amended to his mood.

They were barely into working out what "Civilities" meant when the ancient returned with another, slightly fresher man dressed in robes. Heathcliff showed no recognition, and the man himself hung back for a moment or two, smiling faintly before approaching them.

He said thoughtfully, almost to himself ; "It's always astonishing to see young faces at this hour." adding in more emphatic tones; "How may we be of help to you tonight?"

"We were calling after reverend Greene. He did me a good turn some time back and I wish to thank him."

The recent cleric, after moving through a mental spectrum, came back to them watchfully."

"Reverend _Greene_; he is away I'm afraid, Long away. I am the Reverend Prothero and for all intents this is my Parish, and you are welcome to stay your feet here, if you've had a long journey."

Encouraged that he appeared to be intimate with Greene to some extent, Heathcliff ventured very cautiously into his imperative.

"The debt sir was not our only purpose in coming, you see we wish to be married, and neither of us having any family to give consent has posed a problem in our own parish."

"And where is your parish?"

"It is Gimmerton, east thirty miles or so."

"A long way to be sure and a wearisome journey, the difficulty does not seem equal to the task, perhaps there is more to be told?"

"Perhaps there is; however if you cannot aid us it bears no explaining, and we shall trouble you no more."

Seeing that the pair meant earnestly to depart the abstracted Prothero came around;

"I meant not to dissuade you! I am occupied with other business close at hand. Protract your visit a while longer and I'm sure we will put you aright. Another young couple like yourselves is married here tonight; perhaps if you stay through the ceremonies afterward we might discuss at length your situation?"

They had followed him to a portico at the east end of the room which opened out to an extensive plot of land, where could be seen by the moons copper light a broken horizon of jagged shapes rising darkly against the sky. A collaborative illumination of the heavens, now mercurial in a balmy late night tempest, revealed these silhouettes to be mostly of glass; gleaming here and there through a veil of dust. To the east was just visible the narrow monuments and hunching vaults of a vast graveyard. The couple was diverted long enough for their host to slip away, his invitation unanswered, in the direction of a dimly lit structure at its verges. At a loss where to go, they began surveying the yard. This put Heathcliff in a pensive mood, for which he refused to offer any explanation.

One could see easily enough that the entire expanse was plotted out like a garden, the glebe the old attendant spoke of, yet the paths, all the rows and quaint fences were in a wretched state. The grass was knee high in some places and the orderly designs of vegetables and flowers converted to a monstrous arboretum of thorns, vines, and all manner of venomous splendors, yet it was not without charm entirely. Queues of handsome byzantine trees made shelter against the sky, and where they had managed to elevate themselves out of the jungle, curiously edible things grew.

Beyond the garden, which spanned twenty or more acres, the land rose for another half mile into a placid hillside, whereon like tartan laid an adjunct to the village made up of cottagers and farmsteads. From this hillside now, and down to the garden came a stream of radiance, metered by the wind. As it approached individual flames distinguished themselves, these belonging to Chinese lamps fastened to long poles. One by one they stationed themselves in the branches of trees, steeping the garden in hues of warm gold, and revealing the purveyors to be a wedding party dressed all in summer finery. Assembling into two rows on either side of a clearing they were as aureate in their forthright joy as the light, the glad music of their mellow banter rising and falling with the breezes. Cathy and Heathcliff sat well away from them in a small alcove of shadowy lilacs which, being half choked throughout with wisteria and ivy defied the convivial shine of the moon and all her heavenly sisters.

If they felt securely out of the way it did not last. Discernible only as a singular movement of the darkness itself, two dim arteries followed the palpitant course of light as it wended its way down the hill. These inky currents traced the others in tandem, silent and fluid as the other was buoyant. At first they imagined it to be optic trickery, the glow perhaps leaving a negative aura imprinted on the eye, however just as the guests were arranged appropriately the trailing shadows emerged within the garden on either side, and showed themselves to be nothing more than ordinary humans beings. Discounting their plain attire which in contrast to the fresh and festive costumes of the light bearers appeared somber, and their collective disposition whose arcane dynamics apparently required of them total silence in the midst of jovial discourses, their presence could not be considered dour. It seemed rather they were gripped by anticipation so intense that even the mere routine of drawing breath must be calculated with artful strategy, so as not to shatter an outcome. Even so, peering round for the bride and groom they rustled, and sighed, and were full of wonder as people just waking from a long sleep. Cathy thought they must certainly be from some other village, perhaps the faraway home of bride or groom, whose customs were so eccentric that by comparison hillsides full of antiquated cottages, and Stone Age farmers looked revolutionary. Eventually, one small faction of the illuminators grouped together as a string band, comprising a fiddle, a mandolin and a small harp, and struck up with _Give me your hand_, especially affecting woven through the breezes .At this the odd crowd sharing Cathy and Heathcliff's ianthine obscurity turned about and came alive. Thus except for the queer way in which they held asunder, their enthusiasm left them temporarily indistinguishable from the rest.

Alighting lastly from the dusk and down the merry path were the lady and man of the hour. The bride, a fair rosy creature in white and the ideal for one vaporous instant of humankind at its rare and untroubled best, leaned solicitously on the arm of her groom as if to shelter him. In spite of her youth she carried herself without diffidence. This companionable ardor and self-possession registered sharply with Heathcliff; He found himself awed by her, but then there was the sting and attendant insult inherent in witnessing the happiness which should be his, in the possession of another. The fascination was not exclusively in these things, if it were in them at all, but in every diminutive detail which came together in the girl. The characteristics of each gesture, each turn of expression and temper struck a chord in his soul, and wherever in that place the archaic harmony issued from its doors had been long barred. At last on peril of mental fatigue, he settled on a comfortable logic; he _was_ envious, simply that and nothing more, and envy he knew had stirred him a thousand canny ways throughout his life. He was restless to know if Cathy was equally beset for she'd been silent, and now sat motionless as stone with her head inclined toward him at an odd angle as if she were listening intently for a single faint sound over a tremendous clamor. He could not get round to see her eyes without seeming conspicuous, and deemed it best considering the general atmosphere, to let such reverie play out undisturbed. As the minutes spun away, each one more novel than the last, he longed to know what she thought, and the more he desired it the more impracticable the idea became.

At the end of the garden path in the sheltering arch of two maples, the couple knelt and received a blessing from an old woman in a mantle. She touched their heads with branches, and their brows with oil. They rose to their feet again, and the procession continued into the chapel where stationed at the pulpit was yet a different reverend than the one who had claimed the parish only an hour before. If anyone else was mystified by this clerical disorder it was never apparent. Heathcliff and Cathy remained invisible at the extremes of the multitude, along with those subdued others. For the duration, Cathy stayed fast to Heathcliff's arm as if he might at any moment vanish, dissolving into the heady scent of flowers, or the wind blowing around the churchyard; after entering the chapel with the throng, and slipping into in the crowded pews she put her hand in his. He did not leave it, or press it away, only allowing his fingers rest in hers.

There might never have been a more amiable picture; the pretty bride with her crown of violets, the solemn groom in his finest clothes of cordovan and velvet, his head bowed to the litany. The lights wavered in the breezes from the open windows so the living gave way to a congregation of shadows, and shadows abandoned themselves to starlight in an endless purling of smoke and color. Each instance of the flames exaltation bound the couple ever closer. Cathy, still and voiceless as one dreaming appeared the sum of divine tranquility, but had Heathcliff persisted in drawing her out he'd have found her as troubled as himself; starting at the bride's name as if the sound of it held a secret. Her name was Anathea, heard first in the groom's tenderly quavering vows then her own, youthful and sweet as any voice on such a day should be, though otherwise ordinary. If these mysteries consigned to Heathcliff were dark and impassable, in Cathy they were ephemeral; the smoldering ruins of an exquisite thing, glimpsed once in passing carelessly. Whatever it had been could not be conjured back.

Hardly were the vows underway, did she become impatient to leave the church; the inferno of candlelight made the room ripple with heat, and melancholy preoccupation was a drowning weight. She was barely mindful of Heathcliff, only half conscious of his feverish hand around her own, their fingers locked now like iron laths. All the while Heathcliff's gaze was searching obscure corners, watching the alcoves and secret doors of the chancel. Cathy knew he was straining for any sign of that other reverend though why she could not understand, only that it went far she was sure, beyond a mere determination that the man keep his promise.

The ceremony over at last, the throng with all its festive enthusiasm revived moved in a clamorous tide from the stuffy chapel to the freshness of outdoors again. The late air was damp with a vague sweetness to it of gale and roots and Cathy drew on it wholly as if each breath of it might be her last. After collecting the lanterns, the party hastened its way back to the quiet hillside. Heathcliff for all purposes had intended now they fall back, parting from the crowd to await Reverend Prathero in the garden, until out of nowhere they were accosted by several of the hitherto taciturn guests.

"It isn't yet ten thirty, what's your hurry?"

"It's not many nights such as this we get."

"The youth always think of nothing save for getting away; soon they set a foot in one field are they keen to get into the next."

"You must come! This eve belongs to the young, to be merry and make first-class reminiscences, and fond acquaintances for posterity"

"And there'll be dancing, and a spread-while that hardly seems so fine at this hour- ah the company and good songs ...that's adequate"

Heathcliff answered shortly that he had no interest in merry making; he'd only come to see Reverend Prathero, and would wait here till he came.

"Oh, _him_, he'll be present for sure, though he won't be hanging about _here _waiting for us to remember him, as if we would! He's very punctual that one. If it's his counsel you seek you must go wide of the light, it's certain; can't figure why anyone would inquire of _him _though."

He was becoming quite agitated with the babble of these strangers, keeping him while disclosing nothing useful; a decisive pain in his side where Cathy assaulted him with her elbow was enough to cure him of his bad-manners. It scarcely mattered, for the droll flock had moved on, too eager for whatever promised jollity awaited to care whether or not the stranger was convinced of its advantages. They trailed them soon after, though hardly with the same lightness of heart. He was livid, without perceiving a reason for it, apart from a simmering desperation; anyone observing him pass up the long mellow hill would have seen a body bent on murder, or some hazardous obsession. In truth he was too thrashed for such plotting, and his stride was still no match For Cathy's, who was resolved on putting as much distance as humanly possible in a given time between herself and the churchyard. Nonetheless, the solicitation of the post-scripted revelers proved marvelously accurate. Whatever unease they harbored was left to the wind as soon as they crossed the threshold.


	20. Toquassen

The place to where the crowds repaired was hardly a cottage, yet neither could it be called a manor. It seemed to be impressive evidence that some long ago farmer had awakened one morning to discover himself far elevated from his humble existence by an absurdity of sudden riches, and unable to reconcile his simple soul with his new status, remedied his situation by recreating his ancient cottage on grandiose scale. Here, unmistakably was the practical intimacy of any old farmhouse, yet certainly nothing recalled the stony gloom of Wuthering Heights. In the parlor a wide planked floor bare of adornments groused under the mass of people, and the low, beamed ceiling was not open but plastered; thus the lamps refracted gleam maintained the room in honeyed twilight, the hues of which fluctuated and rippled with every human passage.

In the cavalcade of forms and figures Cathy and Heathcliff stood unheeded, stationed against the wall nearest the door as if to keep at hand quick escape. Plates of food went round from a huge table and speeches and toasts were made. The orators being long winded and exalting, having somehow gotten well into their cups before the house was even filled, nonetheless were not careless, being tempered by a somber article which raised its shadow now and again; a father ill and stowed away, too infirm to make the journey to see his daughter married. This ghost would reappear through the hours, by way of odd agents and episodes which threatened to visit upon them a return of the disquiet from the chapel. With this, Heathcliff resolved his indeterminate sentence in _this_ place would be cheerier and more productive than the last.

He hosted a grudging appreciation for the peculiar rustics, who even after boldly disassembling their ranks among the other guests remained hopeless ciphers, and no matter the effort they made were compelled magnet like back to their comrades. Heathcliff and Cathy, being among the unsought, seemed to be the only other guests to acknowledge them, save for a sidelong glance now and then. They were naturally sociable when motivated by a tantalizing bit of gossip or history; though the stuff of their parlance was often so antiquated it was difficult to counter without seeming mordant. Cathy guessed they were hermits of some sort; nationals certainly, though of enclaves so sequestered as to still swear allegiance to antique monarchs. Conversely, as recompense for a fellows ignorance, they continuously bearded one another with scurrilous reports of the world; Revolution, fantastic discoveries.

Ale, nectars and wine went round as if it were Christmas, and as the emptiness of mugs was refilled, so was the air with ever more implausible tales. Nevertheless, whatever arguments and claims were put forth, no matter how litigious they scarcely held an enduring fascination for Heathcliff. Even warmed by an excess of spirits his discomfiture continued unabated. He scoured the room compulsively for any sign of Prathero, as if somehow he might have slipped in through the mêlée attempting to camouflage himself as a guest. The form he sought never appeared; instead he glimpsed here and there small passing images, truly inconsequential. Reviewing them he wished he'd been very drunk indeed, enough to forget or discount them all as devilish phantasms. Answering for them, he could hardly make them seem coherent anyhow; what were they? Only people here and there turned away in various attitudes of serene melancholy, or sublime contemplation, with a maddening habit of turning their gazes upon him as soon as his wandered elsewhere. He was at a point where he might think nothing of striding across the room, seizing upon one of these and shaking them until they confessed, and would have acted on it had the music not started up again.

From the harpist, now graduated to a more impressive apparatus, and the genius of a small pianoforte, flowed a dulcet piece often favored to distraction among those still plagued by hopes and muses. But for one grand lady, a relation to the bride as the younger was seen proffering herself for quick solace, the music's charm was a slow and bitter death. Heathcliff could not draw his attention away from the grieved lady, or her compassionate young charge. There was a look about them of mother and daughter, not in any particular feature [He could not at any rate, see well the former's face for it was shadowed beneath a bonnet] but manifest in a correspondence of bearing and gesture, all unconscious. These ephemera visited on him such a desolate remorse he could scarce keep himself from howling out against it. The venerable lady's woe, immeasurable and heedless of judgment, struck him, echoing and surpassing the same in him.

The bride raised her hand to the orchestra and the music came to an uncertain halt, the lovely notes falling over one another like broken crystal. After pause, in which the band placated their insulted instruments by engaging them with soft and aimless allegrettos, the elder lady quietly excused herself, fondly and reluctantly parting with her child and entrusting herself to the footman who waited at the door. She was soon a memory, and the blithe mood returned filling in the hollow where she had been. In the tempest he'd forgotten his own partner. Returning to her he saw she was harassed, her gaze searching beyond the four walls, whither that lonely heart went.

"Heathcliff, who was that woman" She asked, as if he should by all rights know.

"No doubt the motherof the honored lady" He answered feigning disinterest.

"I gathered _that, _I meant you noticed her, I saw it. Did she not seem familiar to you?"

She pressed his arm and he felt the weight of it strangely, as if he were nothing more than post to her.

"Not at all" He answered, resolving to engage in any perjury necessary to avoid a review."I was _obliged_ to notice her, such an exhibition is not easy to overlook."

"You think I am simple do you? Perhaps, still I am proficient enough in comprehending yourself. You were moved by her."

"If I was there is no sense in trying to beat it out of me now, if it's an explanation you want I couldn't give you one accurately. How did she strike _you_ then? Surely it wasn't her tears for you are rarely moved by any save your own. Perhaps it was just the matron herself and her doting progeny, then again with all this optimism and verve rushing about us it seems an unlikely time to be lamenting your mislaid ancestors."

Still low from the pall his earlier foolishness left upon them, he wished instantly that he had kept silent. Cathy dropped her hold and stood away from him, and the look she returned was wretched. Before he could form a suitable excuse for the injury, she had gone.

The band, now fortified modestly with winds and brasses struck up an inspired round of_ the woods so wild_, followed by _lillibolero_. For these, the young bride and her groom took the floor first with all the others soon following the exuberance. Cathy faded into the flurry; impossible to tell if her boots were among the scores of others dashing to and fro, or if one shade or contour were principally hers in the whirl of color and sensation. Perversely, where the departure of the fragile matron left him short , his faculties were now possessed equally by the daughter. It was most assuredly a conspiracy between the wine, the hour and the furtive illumination, but he began to imagine that she echoed through no precise quality, everyone he had ever in his life abhorred or esteemed. Her easy beauty made his brain ache fiercely, with minute details passing so quickly they may well have been attributed to insanity had they not returned to plague him so uniformly; her small soft hand newly decorated with its band of gold, the brilliance of it somehow unfeeling; the buoyancy of her slight form as she danced the first reel with her husband, a child absconding with the angels manifesto; her clear Arcadian gaze, catching him once or twice as he gawped foolishly, then moving over him as if he were empty space. All these would visit him tirelessly through the evening, and throughout many days to come, for the moment he was sick with them, determined to shake them off.

With some effort he discovered again the object of his true desire, sitting alone on a sofa near a window, occupied in peeling the black skins off a bunch of grapes and leaving them in dreadful gleaming piles on the sill. Though he was hardly capable of forming an apology, he hoped his regret was at least palpable, and glanced at her silent form now and then ruefully. She spoke first, and if she anticipated any remorse it did not register.

"Why have you pirated me away to this wilderness? It was foolishness to go on faith and now you seem bent on tormenting me. I feel as if I am in a madhouse and you are the chief gaoler. I wish to repeal my agreement of marriage precipitously if this be a foretaste of the whole mess. No doubt we _would_ be happier without it."

She was turned slightly away, and he endeavored to draw her attention to his own misery by leaning to look into her eyes. She would not have it so he indulged himself by taking up accommodation next to her and attempting to be ever present to them.

"Happier in what way?"

He twirled a lock of her hair round his finger, releasing it just to have the pleasure of capturing again. Unmoved she asked quite coldly,

"Just what do you want of me?

"Striking him somewhere between heart and mind her words were monumental. This very question sat for months within the deeps of his conscience, a monster chained in a cavern. Now brought forth by her he was bound to confront it. Still, he could not, knowing how often an earnest response delivered ineptly might turn one into a fatality. consequently he answered as indirectly as he could, thus eliciting a semi agreeable response without putting himself in danger.

"I want you to revere me."

She stared at him, momentarily mute as if she were truly calculating the sincerity behind his absurd request.

"How's that? You are too much; who esteems you more than I?"

"And to be tolerant."

"You ask a high return for nothing given."

"And to be enduring if you must"

"A lesser person would have assassinated you by now; honestly can you ever be rational, or serious without being sullen as well?"

"Very well, I've spoken my heart. Do not marry me then if it is to your ease, but keep those vows you have heretofore sworn."

"Oh if it were that simple, with you I feel there is forever something else. Discontent is a besetting sin."

"Something else, yes again and again it is true."

"What then?"

"I should like very much to dance with you now."

He guessed that she might dispatch him handily for that, recalling his earlier refusal, but the little orchestra worked up a rousing encore of give me your hand, which even the most lackluster of hearts could not be still at, and she, unearthly on her dancing feet was in sore need of an equal partner after being stepped on by a half dozen lumpish lads.

In dance, just as in every other aspect, he showed himself to be her flawless counterpart, and she was beguiled by the sudden presence of grace and the reminder of old liberties; the strength, the weightless soaring fearless motion of childhood, and withal the rare joy she knew keeping him bodily in her possession, while his soul was so unbound. But if she was inclined to be too generous with her affection, he in turn plagued her enough to keep it in check. It did not go by him that she had, in her nonattendance of himself , been dancing with other men , and so as they skimmed the floor, round and round he would nod in the direction of particular, if not absurdly suspect gentleman ;

"Was it him then?" indicating an aged gnome snoring on a bench.

"Or him, he looks sporting" at a balding dragoon with one leg

"Those two for certain, they seem dazzled enough, I shall relish plucking the stars out of their eyes with my bare fingers" This munificence addressing a set of spindly,pock faced youths lolling in a corner behind a cloud of pipe smoke.

"Alas all my powers are futile, they refused me, everyone, the sullen princes! So you see I was compelled to pacify my ego with inferior specimens."

She directed his attention to a singular form, stationed near a large urn of flowers; a peculiarly striking young man, who, while possessing a fair angelic elegance appeared as if he were cast in cold iron. She had elected him haphazardly in jest only to find his charm far exceeding her intent; unbidden, Edgar came to mind, how he was in the days of their first true acquaintance, and this recollection visited her with a tiresome unease. She attempted to dismiss the occurrence in its entirety by moving herself and Heathcliff in another direction, but by then the music had ended, and she discovered with regret he was preoccupied as well. He turned about, seeking the man, but he had gone.

"I _know_ that face, I swear I've seen his like a dozen times, but cannot remember his name, or _where_ it was.

Who would you be so familiar with in this vicinity?

"Did I suggest a direct association? I might recall a name quickly for that; and it is obvious even to my dullards' eye he is no rustic indigene."

"You reason he is an affiliate of mine somehow and you have gained intelligence of him by chance, is that right? You conceive such absurdities, just as I imagined I knew that old dame."

Tell me then how he is arbitrarily picked from a sea of faces?"

"Just so! Now answer _me_ if you will,what opportunity, what purpose would I have to construct such an intrigue? I think your brain has gone feeble from too much fruitless musing."

"Far better I find comfort in madness than suffer your treachery with a sound mind."

"My _treachery, _I think you have overplayed your hand at last Heathcliff. We have not this whole evening been in each others company five minutes that you haven't provoked me. I am sorely tempted to leave you for home but I will consider the onus of our situation and excuse you a third time; it's all put off to nerves and too much wine."

"My nerves are exceptional; it is the pliability of your own which I find suspect."

With that her generosity reached its limit, and with a most disparaging resignation she turned away from him in haste, although before she could escape he took hold of her arm. Abrupt or harsh there would have been spare hope in the appeal being heeded, its gentle tenacity however stilled her completely, and left her fighting only to maintain her last defenses; her gaze meeting his, a remarkable sentience passed between them. It was not the first instance of this silent understanding; many times since his return she had met it, and felt it reflected in herself. Nonetheless, neither of them spoke of it, after all what was there to say? In that exchange lived a truth far greater than themselves, the secret of their mutual eternity; _you know and I know how we are bound, be still don't wander." _ In that contemplation she realized at once, often too poignantly, all her desires and all her terrors.

"Go then my love, dance with whomever you please. We'll not protract our stay above another hour or two, and I assure you in that time, and ever after you are safe from my inane spite .You know what I am, so I pray you discern just as profoundly that my unkindness is never to you. My spirit wounds too often in its effort to find empathy."

"What will you do for so long without anyone to torture?"

"You have been accurate on one point, but wretchedly misguided on the other. It is in fact I think an insufficiency of spirits causing us to be softheaded. I plan to drink enthusiastically until our infernal redeemer appears, then of course I will be precipitously and thus evermore sober."

"If the spurious reverend never comes, what then? It does not figure right at all when you consider it, that a well intentioned man would be roaming the countryside in the dead of night. If he is, then why, what is he biding his time for? I am sure he is a charlatan of some sort."

"Do not sound the alarm in such haste; as you recall I was only anticipating a _fraud_ by a different name."

With this they parted, vanishing into their respective distractions.

He could never recall such an assemblage. It occurred to him that the disorder around him conveyed less the air of a celebration than that of a mobbing. It stretched on without obeisance to nature or time, not allowing itself to be calculated by any recognizable increments, disregarding the condition of those in its thrall. The result was this; rather than becoming agreeably spare as each guest wearied from too much food or wine or talk, the melee simply replenished itself with new faces, all coming and going in such a way that he could not persuade himself each was a unique identity, and that perhaps he had not seen them a hundred times that evening sporting a different guise on each occasion. The only certain absence was the girl and her groom, escaped long since. He knew this because at some juncture in the inexhaustible night he unconsciously began to seek _her_ out, his eyes and his senses strained so in the effort that he imagined himself effectively digested by the surrounding madness.

He kept his pledge to Bacchus, and ruling him benevolent, but entirely too unreliable became thus dedicated to a multitude of more robust, if obscure Gods. What a battle they raged in him, some bargaining for peace, some thundering for mutiny, and others inclined to the archest poetic incongruities. As he observed from his vantage point of obscurity the increasing lunacy unfold around him, this last association gave him renewed cause to appreciate his brief autonomy.

He'd been cataloging the wasteland of a banquet, laboring to find any unpolluted edible which he might bring to Cathy as a peace offering, when for no good reason at all he fell into talking politics with a woman from Rouen. He had little cause to engage himself in conversation with anyone, further he abhorred discussions on republic and empire, though he could hold his own in such conversation as well as any old demagogue. However, this lady, twice his age and unfairly preserved for it, splendidly though modestly attired, and richly coiffed with an impossible wealth of tresses cascading down her glowing flesh, was a vortex amongst a sea of sluggardly provincials. Unfortunately, whether he was too drunk to care, or too drunk to guess he was being made a fool of, the exchange quickly became unmanageable. She saw something terribly amusing in his criticism of the _Compte rendu au roi, _and his speculations on the siege of Cuddalore, and he in turn could only guess that she suffered from a singular hysteria, or even brilliance. The content of her of her dialog, utterly incoherent in its pertinence to his own and inimitably disconnected from it, was nonetheless so cleverly constructed and meticulous only the mind of a poet or a writer might have given birth to it. Histories skipped forth in time taking their facts and figures on mad journeys down outlandish paths, and he had the disconcerting notion that while being conveyed so wildly along, they were looking back and laughing at him.

This exchange continued for a quarter hour, until at last it reached some position where a simple argument _might_ have solved the mystery of the entire discussion. Heathcliff had strayed away, out of exhaustion or embarrassment from history and its questionable particulars, and into soundly current subjects that while analogous, were hardly mutable from any angle. In essence, themes that were of interest to himself; windmills, canals and spinning mules; ultimately she was less impressed with his intimate knowledge of mechanics than she was incredulous of his delight in them. His bullish forecast of such advances eventually leading to the dissolution of hierarchy, and all autocrats great and small incited such exasperation he nearly wished he had kept his mouth shut and left her to her former ramblings.

"Are you really so deluded as to believe that man, _through_ such resourcefulness will not simply find more effective and stealthy ways of enslaving his fellows?"

"How so, is a machine not the decisive claim of autonomy? It moves along uncomplaining, without thought or feeling, but for the collective efforts of its agents, who have only the task of seeing to its operation."

"Its agents…Who then operates the operatives?"

"It hardly matters, for it stands to reason that if the world is _full_ of machines then one man cannot be the tyrant of another because he will simply find another to make his living at."

"And if machines are so numerous, would there not equally be multitudes lining up to keep them running, thus the first operative has his pick of slaves, and has no reason not to take the one who values himself the least."

"Why would he not choose the one who values himself the most, isn't an enlightened man, a confident man a better laborer naturally, and thus worth more to their superior? "

"What a delightfully ignorant utopia you dwell in! Have you ever imagined any of your _enlightened_ agents being no higher than your knee and no more able than a mouse to affect such brazen strategies?The bowels of your great engines full of little fingers and oiled by mothers tears."

Momentarily stunned by this enunciation, he could only stammer out a weak defense of his position.

"Does Progress not by its nature eliminate the possibility of such gruesomeness?"

"Progress unchecked demands it!-but that is the heartbreak of your age, that you spur recklessly onward and cannot see the tragedy of your own existence unfolding; though how you weep with hindsight! But never mind, I have said too much, you my comely friend are one still lost to his own condition, it is not my place to grieve you."

With that she took her leave of him, and her exit was fitting enough; sidling very close to him before he thought to back away, she kissed his cheek, and slipping her hand beneath his jacket squeezed him hard enough to draw breath, whispering

"Remember me, dear."

He hadn't time even to be humiliated before she vanished into the shadows. Wretchedly unnerved, he found his equilibrium in a carafe of fiery liquid which he could not identify from the nights malefic bouquet. It rendered his limbs instantly and almost entirely numb, yet left his thoughts quite buoyant. Anxious to get from that table and the possibility of another such conversation, he seized the thing nearest, a gilded box of confections, and resumed his vigil for the misplaced reverend.

In a evening filled with strange, ever changing faces, never did he see Prothero, or even his like; instead he began imagining again he glimpsed the shade of the absent bride, moving as a moth through flickering light. As if in sly rejoinder to this novel torment, he would fix her presence, only to discover another elusive winged vision; Cathy, who had avoided him for the better part of two hours now. Threading through the confusion, she was as light as the other; remote and fleet yet always back in his sight again, until the throng at last was rendered harmless dream.

The aurorae had faded with the innocence of the night, and now only a few harsh flames respiring in sconces here and there lit the rooms; walls and doors and people disappeared into great expanses of darkness, never reemerging, and he caught her just retreating into a gulf, rounding a far wall near the back of the house. Stumbling toward this darling vision, following it to a nether region of the house, he wondered if it were not some cruel hallucination, for she was nowhere to be found. Standing for a moment in complete confusion near a staircase, he had all but given up when something flew from the dark and seized him terrifyingly. Before throwing it off he realized it was warm and soft, and cast off full of familiar mirth rather than cold vengeance.

"What are you up to following a lady into the dark?"

"Cathy, my God! Don't, if you only knew how I passed these last hours!"

"Have you found your reverend?"

"Not a sign, but I swear if this night continues as it has I shall need him to read my final rites."

"There's twenty minutes left yet to your sentence, you'll not be in danger as long as you stay with me."

"I need no solicitation, and here, I have pilfered us some solace"

He sat down on the step next to her handing her the box of sweets and a bottle of rosolio which had escaped the gluttony. The stairs were commodious enough that he could recline across them and lay his head in her lap while they talked. And in this way he suddenly no longer cared if the reverend materialized or the night ever ended. They passed the rare liquid back and forth, but she put the candy aside with a wry face, reminding him that she hated sweets. Before she discarded them an inscription on the box caught her eye.

"_Puissiez-vous connaître __la joie __tous les soirs de __mille __petites morts_"

"What does that mean-no don't read it for me! I have translated it well enough. '_May you know the joy every night of a thousand little deaths.' _It must be a curse-a curse written on a box of trifles left at a wedding feast, how very dreadful, and-intriguing. Should we eat them Heathcliff and die together?"

"I don't think it's a curse-"

"Then?-"

"Never mind, - I don't know, not really; I met a _Rouennais _tonight who says King George pisses wine and that I am a nearsighted firebrand"

"What is a _Rouennais?"_

"A Frenchwoman, from Rouen; remind me, even if we should wear out every path traveling the world, I have sworn today I shall never go to France. And have you fared better tonight?"

"I did, as you permitted."

"Who then did you dance with?"

"I danced with limpets, and beetles and peacocks, and all the while I wished for a comet or typhoon to come and sail me out."

"We are a fine pair in that are we not?"

"We are. I might give you another chance if you were game, for there is someone starting now on a fiddle."

"I decline the offer of any more romps in this abattoir. Besides I have concluded the dancing they do in this part of the world is generally rather dull,and after a few hours it begins to seem like some sort of Dark Age torture whose genius lies solely in the unique agony of calculated disorder."

"Forgive us boorish peasants we only aspire to gentility. What is your worldly solution to our stodgy labors?"

"Aspiring to gentility…Therein is the folly! The value of movement can only be measured by its worth to the soul. Where I traveled, not long before coming home, in the villages and towns still uncorrupted, I saw people who had a dance for every occasion and every season of life, and these were observed with such beauty and joy, and the music, and the songs…"

"But you will never tell me any more about these places and people will you?"

"It all seems like centuries ago, it is often so difficult to flesh out again. I know that hardly makes sense, but Cathy, all my time away, wherever I walked whether a road in India or the sea cliffs of Ireland I could not look too long at the world for fear my soul would be torn to pieces. I only kept it by the most extraordinary means. I never wanted to know how it went on without you, so I said then, let me be blind until she walks with me."

"It is not easy for me to believe that in all that time you had not one day of peace, of respite or pleasure."

"I did of course, it is only human, but they were never realized as such moments should be, and therefore, valueless. I would if you will, like to dismiss it from our conversation, and I do hate the sound of my own voice droning on. Say anything to me now that I will not speak for a while."

"My ingenuity falls flat at this hour, but here is something; the other night I dreamt I was walking through a great hall of white marble, so vast I could not see the ends or the ceiling of it, but all around were books and papers and manuscripts, anything which might hold a pen mark, and some of these, sheets loosed from their bindings went flying all around me. I set about catching them and trying to read what was written, but before I could commit them to memory they vanished. I recall persisting out of indignation until I at last captured something-but it is so brief!

_" stars like silver doves"_

" That I dreamed your dreams instead of mine. I will remember for all eternity you said that, for it seems itself a voice out of time"

"_Silver doves_ … I wish we were with them now rather than here"

As if in answer to this longing a draft rushing in through an open door found them, washing them in the sweet fragrance of the restful earth and the lulling summer skies. Just at this time they noticed a quiet, almost imperceptible alteration in the ether of the house. The raucous tide had receded gradually until now it was no more than a muffled din, the very same rowdy noise heard from a great nullifying distance. Floating on its surface was the fiddler's tune which had drifted from its spirited gamboling, into a plaintive and hollow elegy. The stairs where they sat did not afford them a view of the anterior, so it was necessary for them to come out of hiding in order to see what went on.

The scene which greeted them seemed at odds with the pensive clamor. Someone had relit the lamps so the rooms were as bright as day again, and half the crowd of people appeared still with expectation, while the other half dedicated themselves evermore worshipfully to their revelries, though there was no more music, for the clock struck the hour of three, and at its final chime the fiddler ceased his tune abruptly. It was not long until yet a new guest was ushered in and they understood at once, with some measure of relief, the air of strange anticipation. The parting crowd [some welcoming, others seeking to be quickly some place unseen] revealed the long sought reverend. There was something terribly perturbing in his manner, for as he made his way through the horde he seemed to be speaking here and there to different people in his path, and yet, not talking at all. Cathy's momentary ease quickly faded. She felt Heathcliff's arm about her waist, a tension there she did not like, and she began to feel ill, yet very light all around as if her vitality were leaving her at once, and as Heathcliff by dreadful inches advanced them both closer to their inevitable meeting with Prothero, she was moving back toward the stairs, and the open door leading out into the night.

Eventually these nearly imperceptible motions became appreciable and very at odds. Cathy was striving now to get away, and pulling Heathcliff to follow. He resisted, confused and irked; looking back once, his gaze met Prothero's directly, and at this she tried more desperately to hasten their retreat. At once she thought the ground was dissolving beneath her. The world vanished for a moment in dull twilight, but when she came round she had Heathcliff solidly by the hand, and he was no longer fighting, but running with her. _  
_They did not stop until reaching the horses tethered behind the inn, and even then there was no letup. As they struggled to untie the animals he took the opportunity in the interval to try and reason with her. She only commanded him to be silent and keep to the task if he did not want to be left alone here. Turning her horse toward the road, she was a madwoman, and he could do naught but follow with the same reckless speed.


	21. The forests of night

.

They came down the steep hill at such a speed he thought for certain the horses would stumble. They weren't used to being run hard, and the steed he'd acquired to replace Surabi was not yet accustomed to riding after dark. But the ground soon gave way to level woodlands, and presently they were at the verges of a familiar wood. Here they stopped at last, and dismounting it appeared as if Cathy meant to continue her mad flight on foot and vanish into the wilderness, but he seized her first and there commenced a terrible argument. He demanded she explain her actions immediately, accusing her of deliberate sabotage, for, he insisted, if it were not the case she must be an incorrigible lunatic. She in turn reiterated her belief that he had lured her to that place for some other purpose than marriage, or must simply be thick, for anyone who would willingly frequent such a hellish scene could only be as corrupt. When no gain was to be had on either side both resorted to ever more trite charges;

"What was your true association to the bride for I spied you staring at her all night?"

"Weren't you a sport, until your knight of the flowers appeared- how did you ever find the time to notice anything, much less myself!"

"Perhaps I should have left you at ease at last surrounded by dissolution."

"Your point that I am stupid at least is well made; what reason do I really have to believe you wish to marry _me_ in preference to running about like a spoiled child, or appealing to high-flown virtues neither of us possesses. You managed to be honest once in your assessment of me, come tell me now as we stand what a cur I am, what a disgraceful husband I would make- is that it Cathy, you are happier keeping me at your feet as your black dog rather than at your side as your mate because it better serves your vanity-"

"Don't …oh don't!"

Her words were no more than a despairing gasp, and she was retreating, her expression as piteous as her voice. He heard her uneasy respiration, a strange cadence he remembered from long ago whenever, as a child, she forced back tears. She suddenly turned her back to him, and was vanishing quickly into the voracious darkness; he came round and by then all he saw was the white of her dress beneath her dark coat. He followed, stumbling along at first for it was such a rapid contrast from the open moonlit fields he feared a moment he'd been struck blind. The trees leaned in close and heavy all around, and the green life which breathed so sultry before was a treacherous mass of dry grasping briers and skeletal branches. The frail plum light of the sky was swallowed by the unremitting gloom, and for a while nothing was visible save for black shapes moving against the shifting darkness.

As soon his eyes adjusted he saw Cathy near him at the edge of a clearing. She threw herself on the earth, a great sigh shuddering through her like a legion of demons. After securing the two horses Heathcliff settled near her in the cradle of two fallen oaks. The ages had left the stately trunks nothing more than a quiet bank above the loam, the ancient wood, soft with mosses and pliant with the secret tunnels of insects and nocturnal creatures. He thought it was possibly the finest couch he had ever rested on.

He'd been trailing his hand through earth and fallen leaves, waiting for her to speak, to stir to give any sign that she was yet on the same side of the night as him, when he encountered the abrupt softness of her fingers closing around his own. She released them just as quickly, as if such contact were volatile, but asked if he would not come down and be near. He hesitated, reluctant to leave his refuge, for it had yielded so he imagined they were mad of the same stuff. Though hardly able see her in the void, he sensed her watching, waiting impatiently in her own feverish limbo, and so he obliged.

"Now, tell me _why_?"

He leaned over to whisper to her, for ill temper was barely quelled and the thought of his own voice breaking the stillness again with such violence was gruesome. Holding his arm she brought him yet closer for her answer."

"We are_ fugitives_; all night I sensed something frightful in that place, and no matter how I drank or how I danced I could not escape it. Once in the presence of the Reverend, such as he calls himself, it was a hundred times worse! I cannot explain to you exactly how it was, but it was as if I were being siphoned away little by little, as if all that was myself, all my present thoughts and ideas were being called out one by one, leaving me and taking the shape of me in another place, some dim and dreadful place without color or warmth.

"I can almost imagine what you mean… yet, it is too absurd to give in to such fancies"

Disentangling himself from her grasp he drew away from her, frustrated. Not only did her words trouble him, assimilating through the warm hush of her breath his own his senses, but he recognized distinctly in himself the certainty of her fear, and in consequence recalled the same dreadful awareness of dissolution. Even before the arrival of Prothero he imagined himself slowly, inevitably draining out into the ether. Despite his efforts to chase it away with drink and what reasoning he might retain, the impression came back again and again, assuming the time between his fascination with Anathea, and his search for Cathy.

"The man you accused me of knowing, was that not a terrible instance of misapprehension?"

"I regret that and as penance will swallow my words sideways and happily bleed to death, but what was I to deduce being so certain I knew him and so convinced I did not?"

In Cathy's thoughts the dim face of the youth took form again, like a statue half come to life in a forgotten garden. Unbidden, another even more shadowy notion occurred to her, born from the pure chance that she _should_ fix on that particular form. However the night had proved uncanny enough and she had no desire to call it up again. Like her companion she would in time pay for the dismissal.

"Aye, we will drop the curtain on this awful play, but I am not blind; tell me first why you were so taken with Lady Anathea and her mother"

"It eases my mind that I can at least offer some approximate explanation where that is concerned. I imagined-and for no good reason mind you- that they were the only real persons in that place, as if I knew it by habit or principle. As I said though, it is only a bit of madness enabled by a lifetime of pictures, faces and scenes all indiscriminately stowed away. Nothing more than dreaming awake"

"For whose benefit do you discredit your own thoughts? If it is for you I will let it be, but do not ridicule _me _with such subversion."

"I would as soon die as demean you again, I suppose it is for me; though how can I subsist with any other idea and still present myself as a sane man?"

"Sanity is overprized; have you not seen for yourself the consequences of such an aspiration- everyone is possessed by one thing or another they'd be oceans more content admitting to it; for now can we put aside our delirium and be ourselves a while? "

"Very well, but in closing, what madness will you confess to?"

She waited a long time before answering, an extended silence punctuated here and there by uneasy sighs; what she said at last hardly seemed worthy of such a display.

"I loved her name, and that is all of it."

"That isn't all, what of the other lady?"

She routed the subject directly, for it perplexed her more than she cared to acknowledge.

"I was eavesdropping, as I will do, on the natter of some old harpies, who having been temporarily dislocated from their usual hoary tree to a rose bower above me, were consequently waxing sentimental, _thus_; on_ her_-the grand dame of the hasty departure-wedding day she was exceptionally fretful and glum, and her husband to be thought to soothe her with that piece of music. So even though it was not tradition he collected a little orchestra to play for before she came up the effect was such, that its consequence was not simply a fine wedding, but a blessed union and a glorious life. So you see, manifesting at such a fragile hour every silvery note must have had the seeming of a fiery arrow struck into the heart."

"Alright then, how much for your pail of hogwash?"

"Honestly, that _was_ the way of it!"

"Really, well his magnanimous tenderness must have fallen short somewhere if he could not wait one more day to have the lid nailed down over him."

She pulled his hair, staring at him through the dark as if he were an insect.

"I did love her name. You asked and that was all, I loved her name."

They dismissed the subject out of mental commiseration, drifting off into their own thoughts, and presently taking up a more pressing issue. They agreed to make camp until daylight instead of dragging themselves home through the dark; after all there was nothing to return to, and it was sweet to be out again through the long nights of summer as in times gone by. Heathcliff kept a flint in his haversack, so they gathered wood and built a small fire, but the kindling was too damp and the wind too persistent and soon the flames began to die out. After a few hasty attempts to restore the blaze they consigned their creature comforts to the whims of nature. Before its light was too feeble to see by however, Cathy took the Goose egg, which had survived the night miraculously without so much as a fracture, from her pocket and buried it in the earth.

Watching the addled sparks flickering up through the gloom they marked the last stealth labors of nights legions, in the mellow concourse between dark and light; the chuttering of a badger sett, the wary steps of deer and the patter of foxes, the distant rasping of frogs and corncrakes, all falling hushed beneath a choral of robins, dunnocks, thrushes and doves. Between these two worlds a solitary owl stood guard; at least it seemed the familiar alarm, though it had almost a human resonance to it. Instinctively she put her arm round him, and once more he disengaged from her, suspicious and brooding.

"What was that for?"

"Don't you remember the ghost stories you used to tell?"

"I try to forget such superstitions, and hope for oblivion when all's done. Is not the drubbing of this life enough?"

"I don't believe you at all. I'm sure you can imagine no greater amusement than terrifying little children and weary travelers by rising from the ground or grinning from behind a tombstone."

"Granted, that _may_ well be true; and since I do suspect a peculiar degree of confusion on my part as to whether I have yet put my unsavory occupations to the test or not, I shall appoint you as my memory for all time, so I might drift blissfully unchallenged on a sea of blameless ignorance. It is with the greatest delight I give up my mind to you."

"If only you were that biddable… then I am sure I'd be compelled to lose you, like a tree drops its spoiled fruit. In any event I shouldn't want the possession of a thing so shifty."

"Alas, in truth I'm afraid the hour is much too late for you to contest it now. My mind, like my soul has hardly been my own these nineteen years. So where were we?"

"When we were very young and first learned how to speak to each other, you told a story of traveling on a great ship, a very long way over the sea from a place as bright as polished jewels and vast as heaven. There were tall dark forests too, alive with prowling beasts, fearsome and beautiful, filling the trees and the sky and water. These places were occupied by spirits too, some equally terrifying; ghosts who would drink your blood and leave nothing of you but a voice wandering through the dark for all time. You said that one of these took the form of an owl and hiding in the masts and the sails followed you to England, and you were ever terrified at their calling. Your stories frightened me so I took to shutting the window at night at the hooting of any owl, and laying there for hours imagining I heard _it_ creeping round the yard below, or rustling about the firs-a beast with wing span wide as the moon, and great orange and red eyes"

"I know that one at least, though I have long forgotten its name; I don't recall you were afraid however, but on the contrary defied it to devour us."

"It was a long while later, and I was afraid of too many things."

"Are you afraid now?"

"No, it would only be foolish since I haven't any window to shut against it."

"I knew we were safe as long as we were together, such ghouls only have an appetite for the lost. I don't know why I did not say it; I suppose I thought you would call it out on your own or perhaps I had no words for it. But do heed that abysmal moan now Cathy, and don't leave my side as long as we are beneath these trees."

"How forbidding and superstitious we are still; but did we not agree to aspire to a better condition? Only an hour ago you were on the verge of something splendid, so come again and tell more of your story, of people you met away, and how they dance in other lands."

"I have said I not care to remember where I was. My tongue was loose from drink and now that I have my senses back I suffer to recant it. What is the use of anything we do alone, much less to relive events born only from a hazardous effort to alleviate misery, rather than for their own sake? What pleasure could possibly be derived from such paths and what satisfaction in walking them again? I would only lose my way and create an even more despicable image of myself for you to jeer at."

"That is predictably selfish of you! Have you considered in all of your conceit the journey I have been cheated of? _You_ left me behind, without a word, without a chance to explain myself, but I did not resent you, or begrudge you your freedom, though I died with the end of each day knowing not where you were in the world, and now you haven't enough thought for me to make reparations; you run yet again refusing to afford me even the most meager satisfaction of indirect experience."

"It is unfair of _you_ to speak so, to suggest so lightly that I care nothing for your feelings and to infer that that I have erred so grievously as to leave you behind when you might have gone with me willingly. I cannot believe that, no never, for it would be the end of me."

"Believe it-do you know I told them I would go? If I had only seen one glimpse of your face that morning…Ah but we shall dismiss it yet, for I hate to be this way with such beauty present all around us-I have missed it lately-the shower of pale stars through the trees and the breath of the a new day just waking. I feel that the earth has been listening to us in sad disapproval."

Once again they fell into a deep dividing silence. The owl had flown from its aerie and a mourning dove taken its place and its call was affecting codicil to their thoughts. Heathcliff was still as death, occupied only a moment with a bit of tobacco rolled in paper. Leaning over and lighting it from the last embers, he was less intent on smoking it than watching it burn to ash, letting The smoldering leaves and spices fill the air with an animating fragrance.

"What do you want me to do Cathy? I cannot relate my past the way you wish, so I expect I am doomed."

"You are clever with games, show me; paint me a picture, anything."

He did not answer, and she became irritated watching the perfumed serpentine unwinding from his fingers up into the dark, swaying round him like a guardian familiar.

"That is mucky custom you've got there."

He looked at her in surprise, as if he'd forgotten she were there entirely.

"You reason so do you, my charming hypocrite? You've known how to use a pipe since you were twelve. I do recall when your father died you took possession of his and we shared it quite a bit when we were able to pilfer a leaf or two."

"That was just a little while and only for-"

"For solace?" He interrupted not wanting to arrive at the cataclysm of her 'little while' and its killing conclusion.

Silence again, though no longer contentious; surliness was hard won in the last purifying swell of night. He took a long draw so the end blazed like a comet, and holding his breath with its burden of sooty incense brought his face to hers, and after pressing his lips to hers for a moment, exhaled. The headiness of distilled rose, clove and golden earth filled her nose and mouth,and head, dissolving the pervasive disquiet of the day. Drawing back, he smiled a little and after handing her the _papelate_ and divesting himself of his boots stood up.

"As you like then, I am your fool always…but no, that won't do, come here and take your shoes off, I will show you by trial how the nomads dance."

"What _nomads_; from where do they come, and how do they go?"

"Does it matter? You asked that I offer you a tangible proof of experience and I have it at hand."

Before she could object, he motioned for her to be silent, and then to take her position by him. He was listening to the pre-dawn cacophony, straining for a pattern in the haphazard melody of rushing water, wind and animals restless in dreams. In a moment he found it, and so she heard it too; rocks turning beneath the far current of the river,rapping and thumping like drums, the wheeling and wheedling in the canopy echoing strings and flutes, and the scouring of summer leaves burnished cymbals. He drew his own music from all of this, a tune then a song in a tongue indecipherable to her; from this a dance which, beginning drowsily increased in velocity, adding at each revolution a new mechanism until it was all madness. She kept to his instructions however without getting lost once, as if she already understood by old custom the language of these wild movements. It was no less than what a soaring bird, a tumbling waterfall or windstorm knows speeding to its fate. So she discovered something of what she longed for; within a brief time she was versed in the imaginings of a world once too far removed from her own. At the apex they whirled with such abandon they acted as a bellows on the dead fire and soon it blazed up again, showering sparks up into the night. She stood motionless when it was over, though the earth still reeled beneath her, his response to her brief immobility was a mocking bow, and with that gesture they relinquished themselves, out of breath to the ground. The Impetus however carried them still, and without the agent of flight it could only be spent through reckless merriment so for a moment the weald echoed with their laughter, as impenitent as in the days of childhood. When they were at last subdued she asked;

"Won't you tell me what you were singing?"

"I guess I have revealed enough for one night. Besides, my English tongue would only make nonsense out of it. But all is not lost; there is another, not fit for revelry but you might understand it as it is."

He came to her side of the little fire, which had wasted no time retreating once more into embers, and taking her hands began singing, very soft but clear, a tune so sweet and wishful she almost felt ashamed to listen. But he himself was reticent and while he sang kept his eyes on their clasped hands, her pale fingers through his dusky ones.

"_Āmāra rātēra rānī  
Da__ẏ__ita kālō hr__̥__da__ẏ__a,_

_kēna āpani āmākē bāra parityāga_

_Āmāra bichānā __ṭ__hān_

_ā hacchē  
Ba__ṛ__a ākāśa thēkē patita ha__ẏ__a_

_Āmarā taru__ṇ__a ē'i rātē  
Kintu kak hana'ō ābāra_

_Āmāra Da__ẏ__ita _

_Āmāra Da__ẏ__ita _

_Āmāra Da__ẏ__ita_

He withdrew then and looking up at her, smiled. Though wistful it was more genuine an expression than he had managed in ages. Leaning back on her hands she observed him silently, for feeling too much, she knew not how to answer honestly. Since his return he'd never seemed so much himself as he did in this hour, and there was a queer and perilous magic in its advent. She conceived a grand absolution, wherein six years of sorrow had been erased from the scrolls of time. It seemed now as man and woman, though they might yet be poised at the very threshold of dark days, the wisdom appropriated from the great miseries of youth would serve as shield and armor against all misfortune. Even If it was half fancy, she determined to keep fast to it for as long as she was able.

"How is it with you now Cathy?"

"I suppose we are on even ground, but I am still wary of the piper, though his aspect and his voice make cobwebs of all my former yearnings."

He did not answer her directly, contemplating with a furrowed brow, his bare foot in the dirt.

"It is still two hours until sunrise" She sighed looking up at the hopelessly fading sky "but I feel as If the need for sleep has left me forever."

"Lie beside me then, and forget sleeping and waking altogether."

The tenor of his voice stilled her; she believed, in its rueful softness and finality it echoed exactly his latter song. She found no cause to argue, so making a couch of their cloaks they stretched out on the earth, keeping at a provisory arms length as always on watchful nights. But this observance only proved itself too foolish. With the fire gone and the heat of exertion waning too quickly, she was shivering, the chill of dawn even seeping through her wool riding coat. She did not want to give herself away, and so tried stealthily moving closer to the glowing heap of sticks. She heard Heathcliff laugh softly from his own bed of icy shadows, and knew by his voice he was certainly as miserable and shivering as her.

"Cathy, don't be so obdurate. Won't people find it rather strange coming upon two people in the morning, frozen stiff and dead with four feet dividing them?"

"It isn't that cold; I am only suffering for my high-living."

"Well whatever your grief is come here and forget it."

She crept towards him, but as soon as she moved felt the core of her being quaking like the heart of a ferocious volcano, until she believed she might actually fly to pieces. She collapsed in his arms at last, dragging her cloak along and throwing it expeditiously over them both. In a short while the paroxysm had gone, vanquished in their shared warmth, and she was growing drowsy. As she floated there on the cusp of exquisite sleep he began fumbling for something in his coat pocket. Watching him with one eye she saw him retrieve a thing the size of a nutmeg. He held it up to the feeble sky light, turning it about in his fingers. Recognizing it as one of the sugared lumps from the ominous box, she reached up and clasped his hand, meaning to confiscate the object and hurl it far out into the darkness. He snatched it away however, keeping it safely in his fist.

"For pity's sake, it is only a harmless confection; true, its divine secret is the curse of the toothless, bovine aristocracy of the world, but for the little, wanting flotsam of the universe like ourselves, it is only a curiosity."

"The caveat on the lid made no such distinctions."

"That was no omen Cathy it was a requisition, but never mind. As for being poison, I swear to that end it is innocent. Though there is only one way to be sure. Here's to _un millier de __petites morts."_

Before she could stop him he'd bitten off half of it .

"A last request before my vitals turn to bog slime; please tell all those at my interment to pay their respects by bowing low and kissing my cold grey ass."

"Give me the rest of that, selfish boar!"

She sat up, putting herself at a strategic distance from him, so she might still ferret out the offending item.

"Why, what if the poison was only in my half? You know how that tale of woe goes, so come and claim your fate."

"Dunce! She dispatched herself with a dagger"

"But it is our story tonight and we shall die however we wish. So what will it be-Quick Cathy my life force ebbs, my throat is closing, some cruel hand puts out the all the lights-kiss me goodnight –it is the last time!"

Scarcely did she comprehend what occurred next; an impenetrable sadness closed about her like a dense curtain, and, as if she _had_ turned a dagger on herself, an excruciating pain gripped her chest. It went through her like a black bolt, and for a moment she was powerless to catch her breath. She tried to recover without showing her distress, but it was to no avail. Involuntarily she extended her arm, her hand gripping at the air as if some invisible cord might be found there to pull away the suffocating pall. Straightway his warm hand gripped hers, and the horror dissipated. Sitting up, he put his arm round her.

"You were playing weren't you Cathy-

"Of course, and I see I am a far more clever actor than you-"

"I shall never say such things to you again, or speak of my death in jest!"

She said nothing but the grateful look she returned was enough. They quietly lay back down to wait out the remaining night, and for a while he was still and she thought he slept, until he turned to her, whispering;

"I think it will rain before morning"

"How so? There is no sign of it, and a dry south wind is blowing"

"It's on your skin, in your hair, the portent of a storm. Ever and always have I perceived it there even before one cloud darkened the sky."

"That is like you, to reason such things; I suppose we will be soaked then."

"No matter; I would have wanted our wedding night to be just this way; with only the stars and the hectic sky above us. If we drowned tonight so be it, I can do no better for us…Cathy we should have been married today- you can't know how I repent this ."

"H_ush_, we would we have been no different at this hour for it at any rate, I do not love you less for the loss, and you know it."

"But you might have loved me more and I know that too."

"I beg you, no more!"

in that instant the pealing of a bell shivered the air, a deep iron note striking high and dissolving on dark currents. They were in each-others embrace straight away then, as if something had shouted behind them abruptly a warning, a brutal oath. When it at last faded to a soft omnipresent rhythm, she turned about in his grasp to face the restive gloom, and finding there in the inky shadows a sage congregation, she began to sing her own ancient song.

Though she knew it from birth, she could never recall its origins. Just, as nebulous were the impressions it left on the soul, and through the years, though it could not be said exactly when, or how, the words sometimes changed, or the pattern of rhyme. Whatever, someone always came and went, and always there was the seeming of deep summer, of haze and high grass, of another lingering, of forfeiture but never respite, of something or someone standing still in time while time flowed past, forgetting. Her Lullaby floated up into the night, and faded in the dimming bell. Heathcliff, all the while was so still and quiet if weren't for his arms about her, his head resting against hers she might well have imagined him vanished. It must have been then, such thoughts which changed the song so imperceptibly For as the notes went wandering off into the void, and the tale unwound like a thread from Arachne's loom she discerned her companion silently wept.


End file.
